"Joy and pleasure are as real as pain and sorrow and one must learn what they have to teach. . . ." -- Sean Russell, from Gatherer of Clouds

"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." -- Helyn D. Goldenberg

"I love you and I'm not afraid." -- Evanescence, "My Last Breath"

“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Sunday, February 05, 2017

Under the Radar

While the country is focused on the serial outrages emanating from the White House, Congress is getting ready to screw us but good:

Trump on the campaign trail also called for spending $1 trillion on infrastructure, part of his pledges to stimulate job creation in the Rust Belt. Democrats have already put forward an infrastructure proposal that they hope will bring Trump to the table.

Republicans have so far proven wary of adding to the national debt in an infrastructure plan, and Ryan hinted Thursday that he would want to take a different path than Democrats.

“Remember, this isn’t a trillion dollars of taxpayer spending. This is, how do we leverage private sector dollars so we can leverage more private sector spending on infrastructure like pipelines and things like that? FAA reform, we have to overhaul the entire air traffic control system. That’s a huge infrastructure piece with airports. That’s all part of this,” he said.

Get that last paragraph. That's Ryan-speak for "we're going to sell off the infrastructure to the highest bidder (read "biggest contributors"), including the airports and air traffic control."

Doesn't that sound peachy? Like doing away with Net Neutrality so that the biggest telecoms can divvy up the bandwidth among themselves, except it will be the airlines deciding which of them gets access to the best routes. And every highway will be a toll road.

Via Mock Paper Scissors.

2 comments:

Pieter said...

For a party that loves to tout its fiscal acumen, the Republicans seem not to understand how government spending drives the national economy. The idea that you can save money by selling off your property to avoid maintenance costs and then lease it back for use and come out ahead is as unfounded as spending your capital to avoid taxes on the income from it would be. The ideology is a continuing source of wonder to me.

Hunter said...

It's an ideology created in the service of greed. We're not talking about people who are interested in the general welfare, we're talking about a bunch of sociopaths who want it all for themselves. As long as the economy is putting money in their pockets, that's the way it's supposed to be as far as they're concerned.