Letter: Five-cent tax tirade is nauseating

To the Editor:

On my ride home from work I was surfing radio channels and stumbled across some conservative talk show host. His target this evening was the new gas tax. He attacked it like a little child that couldn’t get his way and had forgotten what a mouth full of soap tasted like. He read that gas was going to go up to $4 a gallon.

Was his target the $1.20 rise brought about by oil cartels and oil companies? No.

Was he complaining about the record profits recorded by the oil companies? No.

Did he mention that the Bush family has made millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, in the oil industry? No.

His tirade was over a 5 cent per gallon tax increase all of which is mandated by law to be used to make our roads and bridges safer and more useful.

He conveniently failed to mention that the last time the gas tax was raised was 20 years ago. Twenty years ago. He’s concerned with a 5 cent a gallon tax increase after 20 years without a penny tax increase.

My digestive system has its limits so I didn’t listen long enough to hear how he expected the repairs to take place.

I haven’t heard of God doing divine intervention on road repairs so my guess is he would either like all of us to go back to driving on dirt roads or he supports a bonding bill like the one the governor advocated. That plan forces our kids to pay tomorrow for the roads we’re using today. Now there is a brave political move. The logic must be that with the kids having to pay for our Social Security and our medical bills they probably won’t notice another nickel added on to a gallon of gas.

I didn’t catch the first name. I’m not sure but I think his last name is Lewis and the middle name was Cheap.

Larry Sonnek

Red Wing

Tags: opinion, letter, gas, tax, larry, sonnek