Pay more for gas? Radical U.S. Chamber thinks you should

Seeing Red AZ ^

[GraceG]

Why should rural states with a lot of gravel roads pay for paved roads in cities when they already maintain their gravel roads via the county and state levels and already pay gas tax....????

[GraceG]

Socialism is great for those at the top.

Socialism IS neo-Feudalism and ...

It's Good to be the King in BOTH Systems....

[OneWingedShark]

CWII Spark — Last time the price of tea was a factor, mayhaps this time it’ll be the price of fuel?

[RedMDer]

FReepers, Let's go!
Everyone needs to donate!
All contributions are for the current quarter expenses.



FReepathon day 43.

Two percent a day keeps the 404 away.

[cashless]

Time for you business owners to label the Chamber for what it is—THE AARP of American business. Since when did the Chamber become so anti-capitalist and so pro cronyism?

[nascarnation]

In my view, big business has accepted the fact that Dems are going to be in permanent control (due to demographics) and are trying to buy protection.

Ponder this list of business contributors to Podesta’s Center for American Progress:

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP
The Albright Stonebridge Group
American Beverage Association
American Iron and Steel Institute
America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP
Anglo American
Apple Inc.
AT&T
Bank of America
Blackstone
Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
Blue Engine Message & Media
Blue Shield of California*
BMW of North America
CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield
Citigroup
The Coca-Cola Company
Comcast NBCUniversal
Covanta Energy
CVS Caremark Inc.
Daimler
DeVry Education Group
Dewey Square Group
Discovery
DISH Network
Downey McGrath Group, Inc.
DRS Technologies
Eli Lilly and Company
Facebook
Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas
GE
Genworth Financial
The Glover Park Group LLC
Goldman Sachs
Google*
Health Care Service Corporation
The Ickes and Enright Group
Japan Bank for International Cooperation
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
McLarty Associates
Microsoft Corporation
Monitor Deloitte
Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA*
MyWireless.Org
Northrop Grumman
Pearson
PepsiCo
PG&E Corporation
Quest Diagnostics
Samsung Electronics America
Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, or TECRO
Tata Group of Companies
Time Warner Inc.
T-Mobile
Toyota Motor North America
Visa Inc.
Walmart
Wells Fargo

http://www.americanprogress.org/about/our-supporters/

[FlingWingFlyer]

It does appear that the Nazi and communist ‘RATS have infiltrated the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. IMHO. Time for the Chamber of Commerce to be thrown out with the commie and Nazi anti-Semite scumbags at the UN.

[Mamzelle]

If someone could examine Donahue’s assets…I’ll bet he gets the biggest bucks from George Soro, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and the rest of the America-hating oligarchs.

[minnesota_bound]

He has been to Cuba a few times. A tiny island where he wants to do business. I suspect get bribes.

[rlmorel]

Here is what happened to that $800 Billion:

This was just two fiscal quarters in Massachusetts, stimulus money going to pay for teacher’s unions healthcare benefits in one very wealthy town in Massachusetts:

FY 2010 Q2
MINUTEMAN NASHOBA HEALTH Health Insurance premiums for district employees $1,184,601
MINUTEMAN NASHOBA HEALTH School employees health insurance payments (Apr-Jun) $382,238
MINUTEMAN NASHOBA HEALTH GROUP 4th quarter FY09 health insurance premiums $265,251

FY2010 Q3
MINUTEMAN NASHOBA HEALTH School employees health insurance payments (Apr-Jun) $382,238
MINUTEMAN NASHOBA HEALTH Health Insurance premiums for district employees $1,184,601
MINUTEMAN NASHOBA HEALTH GROUP FY10 health insurance premiums $183,765
MINUTEMAN NASHOBA HEALTH GROUP 4th quarter FY09 health insurance premiums $26,5251
MINUTEMAN-NASHOBA HEALTH GROUP Health Insurance Trust $241,820
MINUTEMAN/NASHOBA HEALTH Emp por health insurance premiums for school employees $18,8029

Multiply this by every town, city, and state, a million this quarter, a million that quarter, and “pretty soon you are talking real money.”

I might be willing to accept additional taxes for roads and bridges in the same way I might once have, like Ronald Reagan, supported immigration reform.

But after having the football pulled away again, and again, and again, I won’t be fooled again. They say they will raise the gas tax to support the repair of “crumbling infrastructure” (how many times have we heard THAT phrase?) but we all know it will be funneled to unions and totally useless liberal boondoggles. They might even, with a straight face, send it directly to ISIS to build mosques in the Middle East.

So, no. We aren’t buying it from this leftist tool of what was once a useful organization.

[rlmorel]

You aren't kidding. See my previous post.

I can't tell you how angry I was when, a few years ago, I tried to find out how many dollars from the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" were used to build a state of the art visitor center on the grounds of a new national park area near me.

Sudbury, Massachusetts is near where I live, it is one of the wealthiest communities in the state, and is located some twenty miles due west of Boston. In Sudbury, there was an old, abandoned Army base that had been closed up for years, and sometime in the last ten years or so, it was opened to the public to be able to walk through. It was great.

Not many people knew about it or knew it was open, and one could walk on dilapidated old crumbling roads through the woods, punctuated by an occasional boarded up decaying building. Most interestingly, there are a series of huge concrete munitions bunkers with evidence of railroad (possibly small gage) that serviced the bunkers, and on a few of them, you could get inside to find old, empty metal desks, light fixtures in the overhead with old fashioned incandescent bulbs in them.

To anyone who has ever lived on military installations, it has that general air of decay you know you could sniff out in the remote accesses even on some large active bases. As someone who grew up as a military brat and spent many hours exploring such ignored areas, that type of thing has always had a kind of charm for me. Anyway, it was great, and always deserted. Just about two years ago, I began to see evidence of activity...backhoes, roads being paved and such. It was a real disappointment, and I stopped going there for a while. Then, last winter, my wife and I went for a wintertime snow walk there, and came across this facility:

Now, just seeing that sign makes my blood pressure go up, but as I looked over the facility, I got angrier and angrier.

There was apparently no expense spared to build this facility, everything built of the highest quality materials, I do believe there were solar electricity panels on the roof (not sure though) but it didn't look like they skimped on anything. As I looked through the windows of the closed facility, I think I even saw Herman Miller chairs in what looked like an office. Bottom line, I see this, and figure they probably spent at LEAST a million or two on this facility, probably more, and now have it staffed with a park ranger or two. All this money WE DON'T HAVE for one or two government employee FTE's. Don't get me wrong, I like parks and such. BUT YOU DON'T SPEND MONEY YOU HAVE TO BORROW TO BUILD THEM! If times are prosperous, just maybe you can do it, but when we have a debt burden of $500,000 per household in this country, it is INSANITY to spend money on this type of thing.

So I decided to try to find out just how much of the "stimulus" was spent on this boondoggle. There is a website in Massachusetts to monitor the distribution of the stimulus funds at Massachusetts Recovery Website as an an attempt to live up to the Obama administration's promise of "transparency".

On the site, you can dig around in a variety of ways to see data, one way to slice it is by project, another shows funds by zip code. Unfortunately, they make it so you cannot download all the funds for all Massachusetts zip codes, but at least you can download data for a given zip code for a given fiscal quarter. Now, I never did find out how much was spent on that facility. But what I did find out was interesting.

I downloaded the data for 01776 (oh, the IRONY at that zip code) in successive passes for each fiscal quarter and got them all into an Excel spreadsheet. Once there, I used a pivot table to slice the data in a variety of ways. The column on the left is a general category, and the categories from left to right are subcategories of that. I specified that I only wanted to see the top four, and specifically excluded the Police and Firefighter components, but since the total money awarded was $25.2 million and this table shows an expenditure of $23.13 million, that means all other expenditures for this community that I didn't show totaled just over two million dollars. So my table below shows the lion's share.

(I only showed money awarded, not money used, but gee whiz, is anyone concerned they would get awarded the money and not use it? I'm not...)

As I went through the data, I kept seeing an entry for Minuteman Nashoba Heath, and it was a large chunk twice a year. Doing a search on the Internet showed this website: Minuteman Nashoba Health Group. They describe themselves as such:

"The Minuteman Nashoba Health Group (MNHG) is a coalition of Massachusetts towns and school districts that have joined together to purchase health benefits for their employees, retirees, and their eligible dependents. Joint purchasing of health benefits gives the participating governmental employers purchasing clout to help keep costs under control. The MNHG has been operational since 1990 and has added several towns to its membership in the last several years." I don't know what the cost for healthcare is for teachers in that town, but it looks from a couple of things I have seen that teachers might contribute between 20-30% of their own money towards their premium. Bottom line, you folks down in Texas, all you Freepers in California, even you Sooners out in Oklahoma, your tax dollars are all paying for the health care of unionized Massachusetts teachers.

I am not choosing Sudbury, MA for analysis because of some perceived corruption. I don't believe it is any more or less corrupt than any other community in this country. It just happened to be the community I was looking at to find out about something else, and this fell out of it. I fully expect that if I were to do this analysis on my town (which I will do) or any other locality in this state or throughout the country, we might find similar activity. What is unspeakable in my opinion is the fact that we took hundreds of billions of dollars we didn't have, and opened the coffers for every community around the nation to dip their hands into. To me, this is the equivalent of a family that cannot meet their mortgage (or their second and third concurrent and outstanding Home Equity Loan) pay their car insurance or keep up with any of the other bills they have incurred, taking out a fourth home equity loan, withdrawing it in cash and distributing it throughout the family. "Hey everyone, I'm going to buy a new boat, Mom is going to get a sports car, you kids can take the rest of this and spend it on whatever you wish! Computers, video games, clothes, whatever you want! You don't have to tell me precisely what you are doing with it (and even if you do tell me, I'll just wink and approve!) and you won't have to pay any of it back! This is FREE MONEY, and we are going to have a great time with it!" We have heard people say the whole stimulus bill is a scam. From day one, I have believed it. We have heard many say that this stimulus was supposed to provide "shovel ready jobs" that would stimulate the economy, but from looking at the expenditures, it is clear that, in one of the single, wealthiest communities in Massachusetts, 25 million dollars of stimulus money was spent, and the vast majority of it appears to be spent not on "shovel ready jobs" (whatever the HELL that means) but instead for paying for unemployment benefits, benefits for teachers and other "unspecified" educational costs (that detail could not be teased out of the spreadsheet, since it is not broken down that way). Spending the money on unemployment benefits may or may not be the best use for that money, but I think there should have at least been a dialogue about the wisdom of using it. It might indeed be the best use of our taxpayer money, but nobody got to even discuss it. It was just used to pay for these things...AND THOSE USES WERE NOT WHAT THE "STIMULUS" WAS SOLD AS. Brain dead liberals think that pumping borrowed/printed money back into the hands of the unemployed so it can be used to pay bills actually STIMULATES an economy. (Ask Nancy Pelosi...SHE thinks it does, and has said so.) It doesn't, but people who believe in socialism think it does. And socialists are running the show now.

Many of us recognize that the stimulus was a bill of goods, being used primarily by many communities to cover shortfalls, and who could blame those communities for doing so. But the unimpeachable idiocy of declaring that this money was going to stimulate anything is apparent, and it is yet another instance of the dishonesty of the liberals (and so-called "conservatives") who not only supported this expenditure the first time around, but are now pushing for more money WE DON'T HAVE to be thrown down the rat-hole.

And I do mean "Rat-Hole".

And it is a UNION Rathole. Using MY money to pay for it.

[Nuc 1.1]

Come on folks, help out. Mine is hitting the mail tomorrow. Yours can to. Doesn’t have to be much, every little bit helps!

[Axenolith]

How about “Take the money given to the parasite class and use it for infrastructure”?

[RedMDer]

[BlackElk]

Instead of raising gasoline taxes, I have a better idea. Levy a federal property tax assessed only against real property, other tangible property, investments, bank accounts, etc., owned by anyone in a top-25 earner executive capacity with any US Chamber of Crony Communists member business and make that tax sufficient to cover infrastructure wants of US Chamber of Crony Communists and also cover 50 cents on each gallon of gasoline purchased by consumers in the USA.

Alternatively, the US Chamber etc. sits down, shuts up and STOPS contributing as a group or by individual business to candidates for public office. Any politician taking prohibited funds and any corporate influence peddler contributing or handling such funds to be sentenced to a minimum 10 years at hard time in the federal hoosegow for each violation. Add these provisions to the Federal RICO statute as predicate acts.

[BlackElk]

23 years ago and also 43 years ago. Also, it was the Connecticut Business and Industry Association (merger of the CT Chamber and the CT Manufacturers’ Association). God bless you and yours!

[Nuc 1.1]

We are all in it together. What a great place Free Republic is!

[boycott]

The Chamber sold out to liberal elites. It is long gone. Smaller local businesses should wave it good bye.

[Buckeye McFrog]

A boycott of individual C of C members would appear to be in order...