Residual Forces

The Star Tribune must have the most fringe liberal Editorial Board known to man. I mean, just look at this.

You choose. Either continue to pay $975 a year — the estimated, somewhat hidden annual cost that each Twin Cities driver pays in wasted time and wasted fuel while stuck in traffic — and get nothing for it except, perhaps, lots of aggravation and the knowledge that you’re adding to the problems of climate change and foreign oil dependency.

Remember that. According the them, we already pay $1000 a year in transit taxes/fees/whatever, and we are getting “nothing” for it.

Or pay $250 more a year on gasoline and sales taxes and get far better freeways and a vastly expanded transit system that helps the environment, reduces your stress and saves on energy.\

They believe tacking on a measly $250 is going to change everything. Well, it is a tax increase, they just automatically solve every problem according to liberals.

Only higher taxes can produce the steady, sustained revenue streams needed to restore Minnesota to the levels of safety and respectability that its residents deserve.

No, actually, higher taxes do not make a “sustained revenue stream”.  Revenue is based on the economy. When the economy is growing, you get more spending, and thus more taxes collected. When there is a slowdown or recession, you see a drop in revenue. So tax increases to increase revenue streams are really one time fixes.

What is lost in this entire debate over transportation is that there is a $2 billion dollar surplus. The DFL legislature spent that before even considering a rebate or spending it on transportation. So when you read from the Strib that it is all some evil Republican’s fault, keep in mind that the DFL had $2 billion dollars they could have used on transportation.

And furthermore, liberals assume that the Government is more important than the economy, and thus, its budget and revenue must be constantly growing, not just a percentage of the economy. So no matter if their unstoppable appetite for more and more taxes and revenue will knowingly cripple and stifle economic growth, the liberals are for it. More government is never a bad thing i their eyes, even if that means less economic activity.

Much is left to do, especially with a million more people and a million more cars likely to arrive in the next two decades.

The solution that most liberals are pinning their congestion solving hopes on are transit or mass transit or really choo choos. They plan to gut neighborhoods, historic corridors, and lay down billion dollar rail lines that carry a few thousand people a day, at maximum. The Strib itself acknowledges that there will be one million more cars and a million more people coming to the Twin Cities in the next two decades. So how will helping a few thousand people lucky enough to travel along these privileged LRT corridors helped the millions already here, or on the way? (hint: They won’t)

Ask yourself, how in the world are trains going to solve these problems? Especially when you take into affect that when these LRT lines go in, they dramatically remove the possibility of adding more roads near them. They’ve chewed up the real estate available, and created physical barriers to transitioning the tracks. (Hmmm, wasn’t that what helped do away with the Buffalo in America’s early drive west? They wouldn’t cross the tracks?)

But again, Minnesota taxpayers are watching the Strib and DFL legislature bitch and moan over the fact they have $35 billion dollars they took away from us, which was $2 billion more than they had expected, and it isn’t enough. Which leads to the conclusion, that there is no answer to the question they all refuse to ask.

Just try. The Strib says in this Editorial that if we just pay $250 more a year, it will solve everything. Do you believe them? More important, do you trust them? They are a biased and liberal slanted think tank and policy pushing organization. To solve Twin City and Minnesota transportation problems, they find some other major metro area, and want to copy their plans to a “T”.

Well, I’m sorry, but every metro area has a uniqueness to it, and there is no out of the box fix, one size fits all solution for the  congestion problems we face. The solution is to build more roads and highways, and expand the existing arteries we have where they are most congested.

When you have a blocked artery in your heart, the solution is not to pay more taxes so you can build a new one next to it that will carry far less blood than your blocked one.

So instead of the Strib just using our suffrage through sitting in congestion to be the latest excuse to steal more of our hard earned money through increased taxes, why don’t they bother to expose the billions of dollars (ahem, 35 of them) that are already available to solve our problem. Nope, they just want even more of our money.

We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. And couple that with a DFL controlled agenda and the Strib as their policy pushers, there no plan on providing real solution to Minnesotans’ problems on the docket in St. Paul. But rather their real, hidden agenda to socially engineer  the way we live and work according to their utopian dreams. Government is God to these people, and should have absolute control on our daily lives.

Has anyone asked you what would make your commute better? Has the Strib, MNDOT, the DFL, or the Governor for that matter even bothered to ask if that choo choo on University avenue is going to help with your commute from Forest Lake or Anoka County? How about that one in the Southeast Metro?

I haven’t been asked, and honestly they don’t want to hear the answer. We need to expand the highways, unclog the bottlenecks that currently exist, and you already have enough money to do that. It is not our (We the taxpayer’s) fault you (the lawmakers and bureaucrats) made too many promises to your special interest friends. We’re flitting the bill, it is high time we get served. We have been paying for a better Minnesota all our lives, you’ve just been wasting our money!

BTW: When these liberals bring up “climate change” and “foreign oil dependency” when talking about fixing transportation, you can bet your ass that making it easier for you to drive your car around is not on their agenda. In their minds, it is your car that caused those problems in the first place.