Tuesday, February 28, 2006

On Hold-- For The Moment

Selling the Grandkids' Property

Let's see. The country is $8 trillion in debt. Solution: sell off public assets. Who's responsible for this debt?  The current crop of rogues occupying Washington. How did we get in debt? By cutting taxes for the richest people on planet Earth. Got that?So who can afford to buy this soon to be way-overpriced public land? The rich. So the rich will be financing their take-over of public lands by transferring the wealth they thieved from the public treasury. They can then knock down the trees, scrape roads, and resell your former property for a really nice profit.  The land will be bought by the slightly less wealthy who will flood into the area by the thousands, driving up demand for public services (expect sewer lines to be heading toward Cowee), which will drive up taxes which will force the poor to sell off more of their overtaxed land. The wealthy? Long gone. Moved on to pillage some other unsuspecting area. Got it? Now, that just doesn't seem fair, does it?Sick of McMansions and million dollar homes? You're financing most of them via the largest transfer of wealth in history. The poor and the middle class have and are suffering to fund this expansion of billionaires. I have another solution.  Instead of selling public land, bought and/or condemned via our tax dollars to the wealthy, who will buy it with our tax dollars, why not simply give it back to the original owners?  The land was scooped away from poor mountain families for a pittance under threat of emminent domain, so shouldn't the land, if it is just too much trouble for the government to handle, be returned to them?  Maybe we could even give it back to the Cherokees; they would have the good taste to build a job-creating casino atop every mountain peak, instead of those wonderful homes and their twinkling night-lights so gleefully illuminating the dark skies. Speaking for my clan, I wouldn't turn away from the challenge of managing a few hundred acres of national forest. I'll even promise not to bulldoze the forest and kill its creatures if that will help. I'll pay the same amount the government paid when they obtained the property-- after all, they haven't improved the property, have they?Want to give private enterprise a boost?  Well, instead of pouring dollars into development, which benefits mostly realtors, developers, and constructors, why not pursue wealth creation through new and innovative products and services?  Build a better widget or new doodad. Offer a new service. Or do you want to continue doing the same old thing: scalp, burn, build, use, followed in a few years by burn, scalp, build, in a never ending cycle of consumption.