BonnevilleAmerica.com: New Secretary of Transportation

One report places her on a Fat Boy .

Forgive my OT, but I'm disappointed to read that she very strongly favors putting more tolls out there. If we are indeed going to need more money for the care & feeding of the future of the US transportation & highway system, which is a song I'm hearing far & wide these days, then I'd prefer higher fuel taxes instead of tolls, as the revenue collection infrastructure for fuel taxes is already built.

New tolls mean new toll collecting agencies, and new agencies usually equals untouchable employees and pensions, and health insurance for life, etc. etc, etc. For an example of extreme agency overhead, we pay nearly one million dollars to retire each CT state employee now, with half pay and full $0 co-pay health insurance for the retired employee, AND their spouse, for life. They aren't left to get by on 401ks and SS like the rest of us must make do with. This lush CT benefits system will remain in effect for all new state employees as well, for the next 15 years, thanks to our convicted felon jail bird governor. You'll find very few DNR orders among retired state of CT employees. As long as they're breathing, their spouse still gets the $0 co-pay municipal employee grade (read-top shelf) health insurance. Cha-ching. Sorry for the rant, but I'm one of the CT employer / taxpayer schlubs paying for this mess.

FWIW, I believe the politicians realize that tolls are less cost effective than fuel taxes, but new agencies are a way to make and repay favors, combined with how lucrative contracts to place the toll transponders and build the new toll plazas would be, (and we would need change making plazas, for you can't yet make every vehicle buy a toll transponder, and woe be unto our wallets if we need another agency to get that done on a nationwide scale) not to mention the major large bank interests that accompany the EZ-Pass style collection systems. (Did you know your EZ Pass dollars get filtered through a bank before the states get their mitts on the money?) Then there are the 2nd, 3rd, & 4th agencies required to oversee the first agencies...

For an example of the way we loves us some agencies, let's consider the "Homeland Security" folk. Don't we already have state & local Police, the FBI, The CIA, & the NSA? When one agency isn't geting the job done, instead of fixing the problems, we build new agencies as a fix.

Same as it ever was...

And to think I was just warming up to former Secretary Mineta when he described publically our unaccountable methods of subsidizing the US mass transit rail system as a "financial black hole."

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