Column for June 16, 2011

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of taking a camping and whitewater rafting trip with a pack of Cub Scouts in the North Carolina mountains. Since we were in Swain and Jackson counties, we visited the area’s famous “Road to Nowhere” (or “Tunnel to Nowhere”, depending upon whom you ask). It is a classic example of government stupidity. I did some research on the tunnel and road project and unfortunately found that this is not an isolated case. If you are on the internet, use a search engine to look for “road to nowhere” and “tunnel to nowhere”. You will be amazed at what you find.

In this case, the US Government took a great deal of land from residents with the promise of building a new road. The Tennessee Valley Authority was going to take the land (including a regularly used road) to build a man made lake. The new road was supposed to link residents to the town of Fontana and some family burial grounds stranded by the TVA project. This began in the 1930’s and stretched through the 1940’s. After building only six miles of road, including a tunnel through 1200 feet of rock, the road project was abandoned by 1969. That left the other promised 26 miles of road undone. Forty years later, instead of finishing the promised road, the federal government just gave Swain County $52 million to settle the issue.

There are several things I take away from this debacle. First, that the government is, in general, inefficient at keeping its promises and really has little regard for the personal inconvenience it inflicts upon its citizenry. I’ll have more on that later. Second, if you have a dispute with the government, it can take a half century to resolve the problem, and in a manner generally unacceptable to those most severely affected. Third, the government is actually capable of abandoning projects and spending.

Depending upon your source, it is said that the Bryson City “road to nowhere” (which literally just stops at a horse trail on the side of a mountain. I walked through the tunnel and on the road to its terminal point) was discontinued because of funding. If the government can stop paying for a project that it can not afford, why can we not do the same with entitlement programs? Why can we not stop wasteful spending? When we hired too many staff members in government, schools, and/or obsolete, duplicate programs, why can we not stop spending on them, just like the road to nowhere?

To put an exclamation point on my perspective, just this afternoon I was sitting in stopped traffic on the Durham Freeway because all traffic was blocked in all directions around Durham and the RDU Airport because President Obama was giving essentially a campaign speech. When it was time for him to leave town, law enforcement closed down traffic, essentially shutting down the area for the movement of one person and his “yes men”.

The ironic thing is that the business he visited in Durham is Cree, Inc. Cree is a company that manufactures energy efficient lighting and employs about 5,000 people. He was supposed to talk about American job growth. This business has half of it employees in China and yet benefited from a $39 million advanced energy manufacturing tax credit through the last stimulus spending package. They have also received nearly two million dollars of direct taxpayer funding for research and development. OK, if tax breaks yield business development, why don’t we just lower taxes across the board? It worked for George Bush, Ronald Reagan, and John Kennedy.

I wonder just how much this major traffic inconvenience cost the US taxpayer. I am sure it was in the millions of dollars considering the employees who could not show up to work and were not paid because of the security, the cost of flying Air Force One and ground transportation into Durham, the cost of security at all levels of government, and the loss of advertising revenue on broadcast outlets that covered the speech.

If we can drop a promised construction project that would have given great benefit to a lot of people in a poor section of the country who lost their ancestral homeland to eminent domain, why can we not stop spending millions of dollars for a sitting politician to give campaign speeches at taxpayer expense? This is especially ironic and painful when I consider the fact that President Obama gave a speech on job creation and business recovery when he, probably more than anyone else, is directly responsible for the lack thereof.

We have proven that we can stop spending. Why, oh why can we not stop spending in areas that just plain make sense?