Forum Post: Toll Road Scams
Posted 7 years ago on Sept. 2, 2017, 10:18 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2555)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Any fool should be able to see that putting more pigs at the trough is going to cost more, especially when the swine breed prolifically but are never harvested. They eat and eat but are never eaten. The privatization contracts that conservatives and neo liberals love exempt our porcine masters (on Wall Streets around the globe) from any loss or penalty for bad performance or malfeasance. They make feudal barons look like saints. But they all think they're the good guys.
Traitor slavers, nazis and fascists all fervently believe they are the good guys. Argument will never change their minds about their good and our evil. In the end it's about whose side you are on.
"... if and when the private toll road or tunnel partner goes bankrupt, taxpayers are forced to pay off the bonds while absorbing all loans the state and federal governments gave the private shell company and any accumulated depreciation. Yet the shell company's parent firms get to keep years of actual toll income, on top of millions in design-build cost overruns….
"Of course, no executive comes forward and says, "We're planning to go bankrupt," but an analysis of the data is shocking. There do not appear to be any American private toll firms still in operation under the same management 15 years after construction closed. The original toll firms seem consistently to have gone bankrupt or "zeroed their assets" and walked away, leaving taxpayers a highway now needing repair and having to pay off the bonds and absorb the loans and the depreciation.
"The list of bankrupt firms is staggering, from Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway to Presidio Parkway in San Francisco to Canada's "Sea to Sky Highway" to Orange County's Riverside Freeway to Detroit's Windsor Tunnel to Brisbane, Australia's Airport Link to South Carolina's Connector 2000 to San Diego's South Bay Expressway to Austin's Cintra SH 130 to a couple dozen other toll facilities...."
If anything, we should be doing away with toll roads. They're a tax on the poor. Consider the percentage of a poor person's income vs. a wealthy person. The poor person pays much more in toll tax as a percentage of income.
We should be doing away with these types of taxes, because a toll is a tax, and we should be increasing taxes on the income of the wealthy and corporations. It's all just b.s.
In my state now in order to drive on the main highway, if you don't have an "EZ Pass," you have to get a frickin' bill in the mail and either go online to pay it (conveniently putting it on your credit card so that the banks can make some money too) or you have to mail a check and go through the process of writing out the check and using a stamp. Such a load of crap! Your stupid trip to the mall or doctor or whatever ends up haunting you a month later! Insanity!
I despise the whole neo-liberal agenda initiated by Milton Friedman through his puppet Margaret Thatcher and her puppet Ronald Reagan. All of today's evils were birthed by the British mid-wifed by Tory Traitors and vermin like MF, starting with Henry VIII and his daughter, the congenitally syphilitic "virgin" queen.
Neoliberalism is on it's way out, it just may take a while. It is a disgusting ideology rooted in the interests of the wealthy and elite that twists morality to benefit that same group.
The protestant revolution and the "work ethic" that burgeoned from it are no longer relevant in a world that doesn't have enough jobs to go around for the number of human beings that need them. We need a new way of thinking, a new "story" as Monbiot puts it. I recommend his uplifting article, "How do we get out of this mess?":
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/09/george-monbiot-how-de-we-get-out-of-this-mess
whose side are you on?