My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves | From DC To NC: Ships of State On Collision Course

From DC To NC: Ships of State On Collision Course

By Bernie Reeves

Fools, unfortunately, do not know they are fools — such as the Barack Obama worshipers who ran down to the boat and jumped on not knowing where they were going — or asking if the captain knew how to steer. No matter, the ship of state has sunk in port.

As usual, the job of raising the submerged American economy will be left to the small business people and their employees who continue to get up and go to work because they have to. The business of America is not, nor has it been, General Motors. Over 90 percent of businesses in the US do less than $1 million in annual revenue and hire more than 85 percent of the work force. All this theoretical posturing by economists and central bankers is, in the final analysis, meaningless. No matter how they screw up in Congress, Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, the little guy struggling to survive will raise all ships.

But the struggle is complicated due to government predation of its customer base, the taxpayer. In Raleigh and Wake County, the recovery will be retarded by the property tax valuations imposed by an increasingly arrogant and self-aggrandizing political axis — composed largely of delusional elected officials and an aggressive bureaucracy dedicated to protecting their high-paying jobs. Cloaked in righteous agendas, fueled by their firm belief that they know what’s best for the rest of us, we are living in the grip of governance imposed from the top down rather than the other way round.

In Raleigh, housing — along with retail sales — is the engine that moves the economy. Due to the newly instituted property tax burden, if homeowners decide to sell their homes today, they will be lucky to have an offer 20 to 30 percent below tax valuation. Potential buyers think they have a bargain — until they see the tax bill. Then the deal blows up: sane buyers are not interested in paying property taxes far out of proportion to the actual value of the home. This anchor, allegedly “revenue-neutral” — meaning that segments of the city and county enjoyed lower valuations in a classic social engineering scheme to soak high-end neighborhoods — will drag down existing home sales and put the brakes on economic recovery.

The city of Raleigh and Wake County can save the day by refunding a portion of the burdensome property taxes paid in 2008 and slashing unrealistic valuations to meet current reality. But they won’t even consider it in their zeal to “improve” our communal lives with environmental boondoggles in the city, pupil reassignment in the county school system and barking on about an irrational rail transit project to be paid for with even more taxes. While Raleigh establishes fueling stations for non-existent electric cars, and Wake County continues to run up exorbitant bills bussing school kids — knowing full well the disruptive practice has been ruled unconstitutional — our vaunted quality of life and rosy future are likely to go right down the tubes.

It is painful to observe the shameless bit actors running the show from DC to NC. Obama continues to campaign rather than govern — as columnist Charles Krauthammer put it — all the while believing that talking about the process of confronting the economy — a la Jimmy Carter — is the same as a solution. Americans, lured for weeks inside the abattoir of policy-making in Washington, are starting to realize there is no hot dog, just the carnage created by incompetent officials whacking away at the carcass that used to be the healthy corpus of the American economy. Continued failure to fix the economy could raise the spectre of dictatorship, as contemplated by Obama’s hero FDR in the 1930s.

Underneath this grisly and sickening spectacle — played out in a miasma of corruption and self-dealing (Tom Daschle, the Illinois political mafia) — the Obama team is blatantly rearranging the deck chairs of the political system. In an astonishing naked grab for the controls of the electoral process, Obama is calling for the removal of the census from the Department of Commerce to the White House; not to another agency, mind you — but right where he and his co-conspirators can literally alter and control elections. Soon, previously “uncounted” citizens will swell the minority ranks to unprecedented levels, causing new “safe seat” Congressional districts and re-directing federal funds away from the many to the coffers of the few. By allowing the District of Columbia to seat representatives and senators in the Congress, another agenda item from the White House, the political process is effectively high-jacked.

And for all his talk about energy independence, Obama is performing a volte-face. Offshore drilling in the US, approved by the last Congress, is now a dead letter. In its place are “green” alternatives such as solar, wind and grain fuels — preposterous initiatives that can literally paralyze the nation.

There’s more. As boomers enter the senior ranks, socialized medicine clauses are embedded in the “stimulus bill; Palestinian refugees will soon be pouring into the US due to a new Executive Order; terrorists safely tucked away at Guantanamo are heading back to the streets; and the war in Afghanistan will heat up because Obama and the gang on Capitol Hill decided that Iraq, which we won under George Bush, was the ‘wrong war’.” There’s no telling what our enemies around the world are hatching as they witness the meltdown of American governance.

In North Carolina, legislators are more interested in banning smoking while avoiding confronting the corruption that permeates the majority of state agencies. They ignore the pitiful condition of our roads but demonstrate concern about the decline of farmland (what do you expect when you force farmers off their land for growing tobacco?), a non-issue ginned up by the environmental lobby.

It doesn’t help that Gov. Bev Perdue is parroting the Obama party line by referring to the current steep downturn as the Great Depression — certainly not the right thing to say when confidence is critical to restoring the health of the economy. As she trashes around to cut state government costs, she has yet to address the scandal that state workers are taking home exorbitant pay and benefits while citizens groan under the burden of more and more taxes. A 10 percent reduction in salaries across the board will balance the state budget overnight. But that will never come up. State workers and teachers are the political coalition that elects our governors.

The tag team pair of Obama and Perdue — imbued with the manifestos that government knows best — needs to put a sock in it and leave us alone to allow the grit and enterprise of the people to bring the nation and the state back to prosperity — and to what is needed most in the Age of Obama: sanity.

(Read commentary by Bernie Reeves in his Between Issues column at www.metronc.com.)