Column for July 31, 2008

Are wastewater reclamation efforts actually bad for the American family?

I read with interest recently about how the Town of Benson was going to move forward with a three million dollar waste water reclamation and recycling project. The US Department of Agriculture is lending Benson $886,000 towards building an eight mile wastewater reclamation pipeline to one customer. The customer, a plant nursery, would use the water for irrigation of decorative and other non food source vegetation. Other possible future use could be for watering golf courses, sod production irrigation, and pasture lands.

Water reclamation is not a bad idea. I am all for recycling used water, often called "gray water" for purposes of irrigation, construction, and other non-potable purposes. If the water is just going to waste anyway, then I say it is a great move to do so. However, I have a slight problem with the US government paying for a small town like Benson to build a pipeline to reclaim said water for the benefit of one customer and the hope of adding more. Why should people in Arkansas or California be contributing to the project here in North Carolina?

Projects like this are what I consider to be pork barrel spending. Sure, some people may benefit. However, it is not the job of the federal government to act like an unending pool of money to be siphoned off for special or experimental projects.

When building or expanding the town's water supply is the time to innovate and include the gray water reclamation lines. I remember that the proposed ethanol plant in Selma was planning on using gray water for its plant. However, there was no such line or reclamation efforts existing anywhere. One would have to be built from the far side of Smithfield all the way in to Selma's fringes. That of course would have been funded by tax dollars in one form or another.

Government grants are TAX DOLLARS. Never forget that fact. Whenever some town applies for a grant to revitalize its downtown, for people to renovate their homes, or whatever, we are talking about tax dollars. Multiply those local expenditures times the tens of thousands of other communities in this nation and you can see why we have such a huge budget in our federal government.

Government loans are probably even worse than grants. Why do I say that? Because the federal government taxes us citizens to get the capital. Then they turn around and lend it to municipalities like Selma or Benson, as is the case in this instance. Then the town has to pay back borrowed tax dollars with funds it derives from...yup, you guessed it, tax dollars. In essence, we are being taxed twice for the same funding.

The federal government has no business being in the lending industry. It has no business redistributing the wealth of its citizens. People wonder why I am passionate about such waste and why I decry it so. It is because it truly impacts each and every tax payer in this nation. There are some who pay no taxes. Even people who pay very little taxes often get back more money than they paid the government by nature of the earned income tax credit and the recent tax rebate incentive package.

In the 1950's, women were primarily stay at home mothers and wives. The man of the house went to work in the morning and came home in the evening. They usually lived comfortably on one salary. Nowadays, that is virtually impossible for many Americans. It means that more and more families can not survive on a single income so now both parents have to work. It means that children are placed in day care so that a stranger can raise the children instead of their own parents. It means that there is a lot more economic pressure that stresses out couples and fractures their marriages. It means that women have lost the sense of femininity and compete with men in the work place instead of glorying in the role of a mother that they were created to perform. It means that the high taxation rates have short changed our youth instead of helping them. It means that welfare queens can have more babies and get more money instead of marrying a man and settling down. It undermines the family. The ironic thing is that such pork barrel spending is intended to benefit the population it destroys by driving the cost of government and subsequently taxation higher and higher.

I am not adverse to spending money on actual infrastructure projects that benefit everyone. For instance, I saw a lot of apparently sewer line construction going on in my neighborhood over the past few weeks. That is something we need to maintain since it serves a vital interest of the entire town. I am all for improvements and replacements when needed. A gray water pipeline, however, would not benefit most citizens, much less all of them. It would be a small population deriving benefits from the pockets of the majority. That is why we have so much spending in our nation and why we can not have "The Donna Reed Show" type family arrangement anymore. The squeeze has been put on the traditional family model and that foundation has been cracking for decades now.