Free Republic

As Rick Perry's record is beginning to be scrutinized, the budget mess in Texas has started to receive national attention. Apparently, there is a $31 billion deficit in the current fiscal year that will necessitate drastic cuts. It has also come to light that Perry, rather than making the necessary cuts in 2009, took Obama stimulus funds and used over $6 billion of the stimulus to plug his deficit. The deficit has now exploded, as they tend to do when not addressed early, and the stimulus money has dried up and blown away like a tumbleweed, leaving the state awash...

Imagine if the government taxed you for food, then gave you the money back for groceries and told you what you had to buy, and where you could buy it. That's what the government is doing to states with transportation spending, and the new 112th Congress should restore sanity by returning fuel taxation and highway spending to the states. Congress levies taxes of 18 cents for gasoline and 24 cents for diesel, puts the revenue into the Highway Trust Fund, then returns it to the states to spend on transportation. States in the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains,...