Report From the Editor

It is hard to be philosophical about an increase in depreciation of fleet cars this year, even though we may consider the demise of the Excise Tax a long-term blessing. During my impressionable years I was frequently warned with that familiar old cliché: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." That's why I'm uneasy in the knowledge that the federal highway program is lagging farther and farther behind because of a lack of funds, and a new utopian plan of beautification is to be financed with the retained 1% tax on new car sales. What puzzles me is where the money is supposed to come from to cover the additional deficit which this proposal of Mr. Johnson's will surely create. Since the states must pay a portion of the highway expansion program, and since the revenue in all programs-at all levels-seems to be less than the projected need, we can expect an increase in taxes to replace any tax which has been eliminated. The ultimate victim is, of course, the motorist. The catalytic agent through which the syphoning process takes place on our income, is gasoline. Some states have been diverting gas tax money to uses other than highway improvement and maintenance. Now it seems that Washington has embarked on a course of similar discrimination against the people who use the highways the most-men who earn their living in cars. This highway use-tax, the tax that provides better roads for safer driving, is being eroded by schemes which have little bearing on the safety of our highways, the quality of highways, and the construction of new highways. While beautiful roadside parks are lovely sylvan glens where the tired traveler can pause for a brief respite to refresh himself, they don't contribute to providing what the tax is needed for-safe, top-quality roads.
 
There's another angle to this which bothers me more than the source and form of the taxes which will soon come to pay for this program. It is shocking to know that the President of the United States is using coercion to force the states to go along with this program. He has threatened the states who do not back his beautification brain-child by recommending that Federal-aid highway funds be withheld. The insidious thing is that this program has been presented, like so much of our welfare legislation recently, in words that are cleverly designed to make anyone who would oppose such "beneficial" programs feel like a traitor to his country. It would be great to eliminate that labyrinth of billboards and junk yards through which our high-ways wind. I've always felt that an auto graveyard is man's most ingenious device for lousing u the landscape. But just what is meant by beautification? Is the Federal Government planning to buy all the junk yards and auto graveyards and convert them into roadside parks? If this is true, just think of all of the programming and planning that will go into this project. Otherwise a lot of do-gooders and theorist would be out of their cushy Federal jobs. This will also means that desolate, junk-yardless areas like those long stretches across Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah, to name a few, would have less parks than Pittsburgh or Brooklyn. Anyone can see how unfair it would be to culturally deprive a segment of the population from gloxinias and nasturtium gardens and other horticultural delights to flash across the eyes at turnpike speeds. The only obvious solution is to buy vacant property to make the program fair to all. After all, money is no object. So now Eagle Flat, Texas; Pratt, Kansas; and Current Creek, Nevada, will have their share of comfort stations, drinking fountains, gardens and black-top out of the highway funds. What patronage possibilities for purchasing outhouses, rustic fencing, bar-B-Q pits, grass seed, and pavement. Just think of the new employment possibilities. There will have to be a technician in a supervisory capacity to keep track of the paper supply; then farther down the scale, two men to cut grass and prune the snapdragons; still farther down we will need a foreman and a helper to pick up the litter after the public gets through using their beauty spot; a truck driver to haul the trash away. We will need more police protection for the intrepid campers and the over-amorous teen-agers from the "wild-ones" on motorcycles and other psychopaths who headquarter in such places. We'll have to buy lawn mowers, trucks, refuse bins (which are never used), and signs-lots and lots of signs-so as to guide the errant kidney to the right entrance, and to prohibit almost everything with regulations created by a bureaucracy which reflects bureaucratic thinking, or lack thereof, on large, opaque signs that blot out the beauty which has been provided for out welfare at the cost of decent roads. Instead of better, safer highways for out taxes, what do we get? Bird sanctuaries, tulip beds and heliotropes.

The time is long past when we, as Americans should question programs like this no matter who dreams them up. It is long past the time when we should seriously ask ourselves; "What is happening to America?" Why not write your ideas to your congressman? The pro-welfare people-the people living off of YOUR income-do it every day.