"Over? Nothing's over until
we decide it is. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8lT1o0sDwI
Seriously -- this administration wants user fees. So did the last one. So did the one before that. Now, these guys (and the last few months of the last guys) have squandered so much money, and are continuing to squander so much money, that it's going to hurt everybody (and everybody's grandchildren and great-grandchildren). This year, about 139 million Americans are paying taxes (and about 205 million, apparently including Congress and the Cabinet, are not). The trend is for fewer and fewer tax payers to carry more and more tax eaters.
So we might ultimately lose the user fee battle. Obama says he will only tax couples making over $250k, but if he took every penny that every $250k and up earner makes -- a tax rate of 100% -- it still wouldn't pay off his stimulus and Bush's TARP bills, let alone the new bills coming down the pike.
The economy is a mess because capital is on strike. Capital is on strike because those that have it (mostly smallholders with pension money, etc). fear that it will be lost or, now, confiscated. but they can't win by hanging on to it -- it will just be taxed away via inflation eroding the value of any held savings.
Still... what are we going to do? NOT fly? Never. Today I flew for the first time since.. uh... yesterday. (And I had to go back and land, and drive to my destination instead, due to weather. An hour and a half of pleasant flying turned into a five and a half hour ordeal on the highways).
I'd be a lot richer if I'd never flown, at least in money terms. But what's the point in hanging on to money? The government wants to take it and blow it on welfare leeches, handouts to billionaires ($1B for Paul Allen in the "stimulus" -- why?), and $600 toilet seats anyway, so I might as well blow it flying, before the IRS's payroll patriots get their grubby mitts on it. And who considers the world in money terms? In any of the terms that matter, I'd be a lot poorer if I
didn't fly. Sure, I'd have a boatload more dollars, but I'd be a pauper.
So build it, Tony. You know you want to. You know you need to. You know it is the right thing to do.
cheers
-=K=-