A Billion per Mile - and that is just to Grant Street

The American Spectator : A Billion per Mile

By Ralph R. Reiland on 8.30.11

President Obama's constant refrain about the government's unprecedented levels of red ink points to "millionaires and billionaires" as the problem, not the massive amounts of waste, fraud, and inefficiency in government operations.

Remember when a million per mile seemed like a crazy price for a new road? Now it's a billion per mile for a transportation project and the politicians are just fine with it, even if the project is totally unnecessary, even if we're already broke.

To make it allegedly easier for people in San Francisco to get in and out of Chinatown in a hurry, a new 1.7 mile subway line is in the works.

The original projected cost was $647 million. Now it's $1.6 billion, and growing.

There's already bus and light-rail service that covers the same route -- plus roads for cars if you're still the un-green and independent type who enjoys riding alone and listening to the radio and maybe even downing a good hoagie while driving between points A and B.

The 1.7 mile subway line "misses connections with 25 of the 30 light-rail and bus lines that it crosses, and there's no direct connection to the 104-mile Bay Area Transit line or to the ferry," stated the Wall Street Journal in a recent editorial.

There's also the problem of going eight stories underground to get to the new super-short subway -- not a good underground place to be during an earthquake, or during a terrorist attack.

-read on at above link-

Obama's Gestapo, KGB and Stasi all together - Ten Job-Destroying Regulations

These are just the 10 big ones for now, there are thousands of regulations enacted that add up to the death of our freedom and happiness. Who won the cold war after all?

Ten Job-Destroying Regulations - Andrew Stiles - National Review Online

AUGUST 30, 2011

The GOP takes aim at the Obama administration’s worst moves.

When Congress returns from recess next week, the political conversation is going to be all about jobs. As President Obama prepares to outline his “very specific” jobs proposal in a speech, House Republicans are readying a plan of their own. A key element to the GOP jobs agenda will be identifying and eliminating federal regulations that are needlessly burdening business owners and in many cases preventing them from hiring new employees. To that end, House committee chairmen have put together a list of “the 10 most harmful job-destroying regulations,” and plan to take action over the coming weeks and months to repeal or forestall these restrictive measures.

The following ten federal regulations — some of them pending, some of them already in effect — are, according to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.), “reflective of the types of costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has forced upon business people who want to create jobs.”

NLRB’S BOEING COMPLAINT

MACT AND CSAPR UTILITY STANDARDS

BOILER MACT RULES

CEMENT MACT REQUIREMENTS

‘COAL ASH’ REGULATIONS

GRANDFATHERED HEALTH PLANS

EPA OZONE RULE

PA FARM-DUST REGULATIONS

EPA GREENHOUSE-GAS REQUIREMENTS

NLRB ‘AMBUSH’ ELECTIONS RULE

[read on at above link]

REPEAL THE EPA & Interior Dept. - Environmental Enforcement Leaves Musicians in Fear | Postmodern Times - WSJ.com

Do you ever get the feeling that that the government is just a bunch as assholes looking for something to justify their own existence!

Guitar Frets: Environmental Enforcement Leaves Musicians in Fear | Postmodern Times - WSJ.com

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company's manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. "The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier," he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn't the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian's ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms."

The question in the first raid seemed to be whether Gibson had been buying illegally harvested hardwoods from protected forests, such as the Madagascar ebony that makes for such lovely fretboards. And if Gibson did knowingly import illegally harvested ebony from Madagascar, that wouldn't be a negligible offense. Peter Lowry, ebony and rosewood expert at the Missouri Botanical Garden, calls the Madagascar wood trade the "equivalent of Africa's blood diamonds." But with the new raid, the government seems to be questioning whether some wood sourced from India met every regulatory jot and tittle.

It isn't just Gibson that is sweating. Musicians who play vintage guitars and other instruments made of environmentally protected materials are worried the authorities may be coming for them next.

REPEAL the EPA - Ozone Air Quality Standards: EPA’s Assault on Jobs and the Economy

Ozone Air Quality Standards: EPA’s Assault on Jobs and the Economy

By Andrew Grossman August 1, 2011

The U.S. economy won a temporary reprieve with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) announcement last week that new ozone standards, which had been slated for this summer, will be delayed. The EPA’s “reconsideration” of the ozone standards it set in 2008 and issuance of more stringent standards violate all three of the fundamental values EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson pledged to honor: “science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.”[1]

This enormously expensive regulation is unsupported by scientific evidence, violates the Clean Air Act (CAA), and appears timed to evade ongoing judicial review of the rulemaking process. Even the EPA’s estimate that the new rule will impose up to $90 billion in compliance costs annually[2] severely understates the impact on economic development and jobs in communities where attainment of the new standards will be impossible. Congress should make the EPA’s temporary postponement of its new ozone standards a permanent one....

YOU WORTHLESS STUPID ARROGANT BUREAUCRATS!

Unprecedented Expense

The Obama EPA continues to outdo itself, proposing a series of CAA rules each more expensive than the last. Its new ozone standards would be among the most expensive yet, with the agency estimating costs of $19 billion to $90 billion annually, depending on stringency.

Why are the costs so high? Because, as the EPA acknowledges, the technology needed to comply does not exist. Spending on “known controls” would amount to only $3.3–4.5 billion, while the remainder would go to “other, currently unknown technologies that would be needed to attain the proposed primary standards.”[5] Given that uncertainty, the costs may be higher, or it may prove more cost-effective to simply shutter industrial capacity.

[go to above link]