Flood of crazy spending and tax ideas pour in

Here we go. On one hand, you’ve go the incoming administration promising everything for everyone, and on the other hand it looks like federal and local governments think the election results were the go ahead to identify and implement new revenue streams; like taxing belching cows.

Within the last 24 hours, the wire has been buzzing with the Obama administration plans to create new jobs by spending a tremendous amount of money at the federal level. Why the rush to spend and spend when Americans should be saving?

Politico writers Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin have the details on Obama’s 21st century new deal.

President-elect Barack Obama added sweep and meat to his economic agenda on Saturday, pledging the largest new investment in roads and bridges since President Dwight D. Eisenhower built the Interstate system in the late 1950s, and tying his key initiatives – education, energy, health care –back to jobs in a package that has the makings of a smaller and modern version of FDR’s New Deal marriage of job creation with infrastructure upgrades.

The president-elect also said for the first time that he will “launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen.”

“We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms,” he said in the address.

And that’s just the beginning of the spending Obama wants. I can not tell you how important it is to question everything that this administration wants to do. We are loosing our freedoms to the federal government. Does anyone care anymore?

For his energy plan, he wants to change all of the light bulbs in government buildings. That’s right, pay a big premium on new bulbs and ditch the old stuff. Of course, this big effort will need people to make it happen, so it will create jobs!

If we’re going to replace all of the bulbs and hire all of the people to do it, I want one question answered – when will we get a return on our investment? 2101?

We’re also going to be building 21st century schools with new computers in the classroom, build a new infrastructure around medical records management, and of course the federal government will need to invest in broadband Internet to get all of this stuff to work together.

The federal government should not be involved in any of this. None of it. Period.

So how are we going to pay for all of this. Ignoring the fact that we will not be able to pay for it, we’ve got all sorts of ideas to generate money for the government floating around.

First, a proposal to tax farmers who own livestock that emit greenhouse gases. Three or four years ago this idea was a parody on the Rush Limbaugh radio show. Now it’s real life!

For farmers, this stinks: Belching and gaseous cows and hogs could start costing them money if a federal proposal to charge fees for air-polluting animals becomes law.

Farmers so far are turning their noses up at the notion, which is one of several put forward by the Environmental Protection Agency after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases emitted by belching and flatulence amounts to air pollution.

“This is one of the most ridiculous things the federal government has tried to do,” said Alabama Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks, an outspoken opponent of the proposal.

It would require farms or ranches with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs to pay an annual fee of about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and $20 for each hog.

Maybe we should just tax every newborn child. About 4 or 5 percent of the gas we humans exhale is carbon dioxide ya know? Who comes up with this kind of stuff anyway?

“It makes perfect sense if you are looking for ways to cut down on meat consumption and recoup environmental losses,” said Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman in Washington for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Oh, those guys….

Looking for more government revenue generating ideas? How about fining residents $500 for not recycling in Georgia, or the Rhode Island Blue Ribbon panel idea to tax residents on every mile they put on their cars and putting toll booths at the border on interstate highways.

Morrissey over at Hot Air has more on the great Obama plan including the Saturday morning You Tube address. He’s on target.

… [W]ith the federal government deep in debt, unwilling to address an entitlement disaster, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at private enterprises in a vain attempt to rescue them from their own bad management and labor practices, Obama wants to create a new WPA to renew American infrastructure not because it’s needed as much as Obama needs to ensure his re-election.

The original WPA should serve as an object lesson for us now.  It was bureaucratic, inefficient, and since it served mainly as a work-to-welfare program, had almost no way of disciplining its employees to improve production.  The massive resources it ate could have been much more efficiently utilized by the private sector, which could have produced higher-quality work at a lower price.  That has been the lesson of privatization in infrastructure that we have seen in Minnesota with the St. Anthony Bridge project and the rebuilding of Southern California freeways and overpasses after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Right on.