More Shell Game Antics to Distract Wisconsinites from Noticing GOP Bungling and Embezzlement
One example of just how retrograde the Republican mindset has grown in the Badger State is a recent DOT proposal to raise the auto registration fees on hybrid and electric cars. That's right, specifically on hybrid and electric models.
This proposal is both a manifest stupidity and, more importantly, a distraction. More to come on what it hides.
There is no sane, rational, objective way to justify this fee. It is, quite transparently, a provocation, a poke in the eye to those who see right through the governor's actions to the puppet masters pulling his strings. Responsible, civic-minded residents here still labor to get the creature indicted and see justice done.
More below the silly fillagree...
The number of hybrid cars registered in Wisconsin, some 47,000, is pitiful when you consider that over 5 million vehicles are registered here overall. To single out a small class of lightweight motor vehicles that have a smaller impact on roadway lifespan, and, it should be noted, a smaller adverse impact on air quality, than semi trucks, Hummers, ¾ ton or larger trucks, motor homes, luxury cars and SUVs, even travel trailers, is to indulge in bullying that bespeaks a small mind. And small-mindedness is a primary trait of Walker and his yes-men...
Worth noting in the category of vehicles which also have a more adverse impact on air quality (And talk of air quality has yet to escape the Governor's lips), are construction and earth moving equipment, mining equipment (Hah!), boats, airplanes, classic cars, motorcycles, and environmentally destructive off-road toys for overgrown boys.
The idiot governor and his fellow Republiclowns in the state legislature face a budget shortfall, a lunacy, quite naturally, of their own making. There is nothing so disgusting as the exploitation of public office, even doing harm to the constituents you are supposed to serve, merely to advance your own career, line your own pockets via misuse and misdirection of public revenues, and slavishly serving the one-percenters. The two score and more tax cuts pushed through by Republicans, payback to wealthy donors and supporters, favored the wealthy to a scandalous degree. Sound economic policy (see bibliography) says that in time of economic downturn, state revenues are maintained by increasing taxes on the wealthiest residents.
So it comes as no surprise to Wisconsinites with a whit of intelligence that the GOP Confederacy of Dunces, once they were lied into office, did exactly the wrong thing, the diametrically-opposed-to-the-right-thing. But anyone who looked into Walker's tenure as Milwaukee County Executive knew what kind of bumbling, self-interested tool the Koch brothers were propping up to become governor.
The Department of Transportation needs more funding than the clown in the Governor's mansion had bothered to think ahead about. So dimwit consulted the oracle, which means he called Charlie Koch and asked, “What do I, Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, think should be done?” And Charlie Koch told Scott Walker what Scott Walker thinks should be done.
Now if Walker had bothered at any earlier time in his life to exercise his brain cells and take personal responsibility(!) for developing an intellect, he would have cogitated on what the Charlie-Koch-remotely-located-center-of-his-own-brain had proposed and found it contained some faulty reasoning.
An obvious question to rational beings (sorry to exclude Republicans there), if you begin from the dubious premise that talk of such a fee is legitimate, is “What criteria should be used to set fees?”
Should equity matter? Should percentage of road use matter? Should impact on road surface matter?
There is some sense, only some, if you deliberately limit your perspective, in at least looking at fee hikes for vehicles using the state roadways. Roads are the most common and heavily used thoroughfares here. They require maintenance and replacement when they decay due to vehicle transit and exposure to the elements.
From the DOT website:
“The state’s Transportation Fund is considered a “segregated fund” because it puts transportation revenues into a separate account apart from other revenues the state collects that are deposited into the General Fund.
This account is the source of funding for all transportation modes – highways, air, rail, transit, harbors, bicycle and pedestrian facilities. It also funds the Division of Motor Vehicles and the Division of State Patrol.”
But “Republican logic,” if you tolerate such an oxymoron, fizzled out long before the proposal to hike fees for hybrids and electric cars was written.
A rational extension of the earlier questions (sorry to exclude the you-know-whos again), is “Shouldn't the “heavy-users” (whether by vehicle weight, or by vehicle quantity) be paying more?”
Should Wisconsin take an approach like that used in Illinois, where tollways snare revenue from those vehicles and drivers inclined to use certain portions of the expressway system?
Even if informed Wisconsinites who take a long-term view (I did it again, didn't I? I excluded the you-know-whos...) say no to tollways, and the cost of building the required infrastructure to collect tolls is itself a legitimate criticism of such a proposal, regardless of your political leanings, the DOT proposal to single out hybrid and electric vehicles still exhibits glaring lapses in logic.
Vehicle registration fees can instead, and more logically, be tied to relevant criteria, such as how much road wear is induced by any given category of vehicle. Factors such as vehicle weight and vehicle quantity can be used. And because air quality is still a relevant concern in the Badger State, though the DOT proposal manages to sidestep it, hence ignore it, why not target vehicles that have the greatest negative impact on air quality?
Why not institute a fee hike on light trucks? There are far, far more of them registered in Wisconsin, they incur greater wear on roadbeds, and have a more adverse impact on air quality. Oh, wait, is it that owners of said vehicles are more likely to vote Republican? Are Republicans also more likely to own the other vehicles listed earlier, the Hummers, the motor homes, etc.? Is the Republican dominated government demonstrating spinelessness in the service of public good? Wouldn't be the first time...
At the core of this discussion is a question of how much a sound, well-maintained road system contributes to the economic health and vitality of the state, whether those roadways carry employees to work, goods to vendors, or tourists to the north. And because the proposed DOT budget seeks to borrow from the General Fund, shouldn't recently enacted inequities in taxation (guess who enacted them) be rescinded to restore the General Fund and make certain wealthy Wisconsinites (finally!) pay their fair share?
Debate about this or that fee can descend into minutiae that very effectively distract attention from what has happened in Wisconsin: the establishment of a trickle-down fiefdom, a tax-cut-palm-greasing-payback-paradise for the wealthy, and de facto welfare state for the wealthy. Walker and the GOP have legislated this class-conscious abomination. Guess which class foots the bill for this exclusive resort...
What criteria were used to single out hybrid and electric cars? The answer is telling. And it signals just how beholden Republicans are to the oil oligarchs and the creaky dinosaur that is the fossil fuel paradigm.
Wisconsin DOT Secretary Gottlieb, a former GOP state Rep appointed to the his current post by Walker, rationalized the hybrid and electric fee by saying it would "...ensure these owners continue to pay their fair share of the operating costs of our infrastructure."
Since hybrids and electric cars use less, or no, gasoline, goes the reasoning, they pay a smaller portion of the gas tax than less fuel efficient vehicles, and thus contribute less to the “segregated fund.”
Viewed through the paper towel core that is the Republican window on the world, the proposed fee might seem reasonable...if air quality concerns (public health, you fools, and the costs your short-sightedness will incur in that area), chronic short-term thinking in business, finance and government (and the long term consequences of refusing to see and address current and looming problems, another GOP blind spot, and a willful one), legislated income inequality, over reliance on fossil fuels, and global warming, did not exist. And this fee manages to exalt the wrong side of each of these concerns. Guess you can't see the problems, or at least its easier to ignore them, when you spend your life looking through a tube...
It is time to step back, though, and ask the questions, “How did Wisconsin get to this place? How did state government get pushed down a rabbit hole and land in a bizarre world where Republican avarice and incompetence supplanted sane government? How does such a stupid, biased, provocative proposal ever achieve a public airing?”
The answer lies in the equally bizarre ideas Republicans have about the function of government.
The function of government, in Republican minds, is to facilitate the avarice of a select group of predators.
Example: The tired old chestnut that Republicans continue to peddle, that Wisconsin is a “tax hell,” doesn't hold true for the wealthiest residents, who pay only 6.6% income tax. Middle class residents pay 9.8%.
Republican trickle-down apologists disguise this welfare for the wealthy by quoting dollar amounts, not percentages. Defending a one-percenter by stating that he paid $82,500.00 in income taxes on $1,250,000.00 of adjusted gross income can be skewed either as impressive civic responsibility or criminal evasion. But if he were paying taxes at the same percentage as middle class Wisconsinites, 9.8% instead of only 6.6%, he would fork over $122,500.00, a difference of $40,000.00. Now it's obvious. It's criminal evasion, made legal by corrupt Republican legislators. Evasion that robs the state of revenue that it uses, when justly governed, as opposed to how it is currently governed, for public good, and not for one-percent comfort and enrichment.
So if a blowhard Republiclown quotes some dollar figure at you to insinuate that he pays his fair share and more in taxes, demand to know what percentage of his income that number represents. And beware of the near vacuum that arises when he backpedals...
Can Mr. One-Percenter afford the difference? Only a Republican, in a pandering masquerade of chivalry and solidarity, would ask that question...
Walker and the Republican legislature never acknowledge this gross inequity, and are certainly eager to talk around it, sidestep it, or switch the topic to bogus social issues such as abortion, to prevent citizens from asking, “What gives with the tax-welfare for the wealthy?”
The topic of closing the epic GOP budget shortfall, which they created by wielding short-term thinking, pandering to wealthy supporters, and marshalling gross incompetence, cannot be ignored. And now they clumsily scramble to nickel and dime middle class and working class Wisconsinites in the least visible ways possible. But scramble as they may, they dug the hole too deep this time.
Several other states have already exhibited MFS (Monumental Fee Stupidity) by enacting similar special fees for hybrid and electric vehicles, so it's clear this is copycat legislation, as poorly evaluated here as it already has been elsewhere. It does manage to pander nicely to Walker's puppet masters, no coincidence that...And it must be asked, “Can a fee ever be tax deductible? And are we witnessing a GOP push to establish a la carte government, where you contact a state agency (even your legislator!?), with your credit card in hand?” Welcome, consumers, to pay-to-play government...
The narrow-mindedness of such a fee, ignoring as it does the longstanding need for the southeastern portion of the state to reduce smog/ozone levels (It is subject to ozone alert days in warmer weather), signals that such shortsighted stupidity must have hatched in a Reptili- er, I mean, a Republican mind. Only in the last few years has Southeastern Wisconsin begun to meet ozone and smog standards issued by the EPA. Now the Walker administration wants to backslide on that progress, promote gas consumption and reduce air quality, so that it can raise some of the revenue it lost when it gave unwarranted tax cuts (payback for bribes) to the wealthiest Wisconsinites. And they want to prolong the state's overdependence on a futureless, unstable (due to mismanagement, greed, corruption and incompetence) petroleum oligarchy.
Idiots. Absolute idiots. We are governed by utter, absolute, greedy sociopathic idiots.
Such stupidity also screams willful blindness. Republican legislators are bribed to obstruct alternative means of energy production, to obstruct high-speed rail and mass transit, to preserve oil company subsidies and the stranglehold these same companies have on congressional activity, to stall progressive energy and transportation policies, and to obstruct higher fuel efficiency standards. The strategy: milk Wisconsin and the nations' dependence on fossil fuel for every penny until the tipping point at which publicly funded research and development of alternative means will make investment in (and monopolizing) said alternatives the new cash cow for the oligarchs du jour.
Get it? Energy oligarchs externalize and socialize the R&D costs. You and I pick up the cost of keepin' 'em fat and happy.
And let's remember that Republicans also refuse to recognize the existence of carbon footprints and refuse to help engage our collective problem-solving might, the true source of our prosperity. For these “Grand Oil Party” idiots, it's a “my-way-or-shutdown-the-government” mentality.
So, Republicans, you want to fix the revenue shortfall you created? Rescind the welfare-for-the-wealthy tax cuts that you sick SOBs actually increased. (my apologies to female dogs, more humane and intelligent than most GOP legislators...no irony at all there) And stop playing games proposing manifestly stupid fees and offering dumbass rationalizations for them.
Wisconsin State government needs a new DOT: a Department of Transparency.
http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov/...
MacNichol, Elizabeth, Nicholas, Andrew and Shure, Jon, Raising State Income Taxes on High-Income Taxpayers, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington DC, November, 2009.
Mazerov, Michael, Cutting State Personal Income Taxes Won't Help Small Businesses Create Jobs and May Harm State Economies, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington DC, February, 2013.
Leachman, Michael, Mazerov, Michael, Palacios, Vincent, and Mai, Chris, State Personal income Tax Cuts: A Poor Strategy for Economic Growth, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington DC, March, 2013.
Peacock, Jon and Cornelius, Tamarine, Breaking With Tradition: How Wisconsin Lawmakers Have Shortchanged a Legacy of Investment in the State's Future, Wisconsin Budget Project, Madison, WI, August, 2014.