Water, Taxes and Our Missing Candidates

Some are still shaking their heads after attending the excellent first-ever joint Fort Bend Chamber and Central Fort Bend Chamber Alliance Infrastructure Conference last week. The room was filled with successful business leaders with a missing key element. There were only a handful of political candidates present—significant absences from ones who will be asking for our support in just a few short weeks both from the federal and state levels.

Good news from Judge Hebert … Fort Bend County voters will not be asked to vote on any new bonds until all the others are sold. That should always be the case.

Fort Bend County will soon be facing water shortages due to our rapid growth and drought. Fort Bend County is growing by almost 30,000 people a year. Affordability of water will become “a relative term” and it is going to take a change of mindset out of necessity. The example was given that we may need to get used to a three-minute shower versus a 20-minute shower and that we may need to rethink our idea on St. Augustine grass, perhaps only watering once a week. Will landscapers embrace this mindset with the potential that homeowners may convert their front yards to a rock bed? What happens to our foundations? We could be facing a $500/month water bill with regulated lowered usage. “We will have enough water until 2030 but we won’t be able to afford it,” we were told. The impact this will have on agriculture will be devastating. Capping a farmer’s ability to produce will result in failure and is, well, unacceptable as Texas is still agriculturally strong. We can’t tell our dedicated farmers that Washington is forcing us to cap their usage, potentially destroying their livelihood and then causing a food shortage. The hiccup we face is that water funding is heading toward becoming a local financial burden (while the Feds still want control with EPA regulations). Once again, EPA’s nonsensical manipulation was evident. It is time that the EPA is reduced and dismantled.

As we moved on to tax revenue, the devastating impact the “going green” environmentalists have hurled on us with the electric/battery cars became evident. Not only is GM experiencing a negative $40,000 per vehicle, but gas consumption is down with the electric/battery cars, resulting in a now flat fuel tax revenue collected while still needed to fix our roads and build new ones. Meanwhile, these vehicles still do the same amount of damage to our roads as our gas-driven vehicles but they aren’t paying their fair share. And we still haven’t had the critical discussion how the environmentalists plan on disposing of these millions of batteries once they are no longer usable.

The exhilarating speaker, Mark Dotzour, spoke. Democrats still don’t grasp what a “fake tax recovery” is. When Obama gives out cash for clunkers, it really results in a “fake tax recovery” and does nothing to boost the economy. Instead it becomes a costly illusionary perception.

So while we’re watching the first presidential (economic) debate this week and hear the bogus propaganda from this president who thinks he deserves another four years, remember that (1) house values have dropped from $14T to $6T; (2) 75% of individual income taxes will increase in five years; (3) estate taxes will quadruple in five years; (4) this president promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term but it has now topped $1T for four straight years; (5) people in poverty have risen by 3M while we have spent/printed a record amount of money; (6) household incomes have dropped 8.2%; (7) only 29% of CEOs plan to hire and 67% of small business owners do not plan to hire; (8) our GDP growth is down to 1.3%; (9) orders for durable goods in manufacturing have plunged more than 13.2% in August—even worse than the economists’ predictions; (9) Obama continues to apologize for us and refuses to acknowledge terrorist acts, (10) Obama continues to lower our nuclear missiles—wanting to dip below 300, (11) Obama’s unemployment war on blacks has doubled, followed by Hispanics, followed by women; and worst of all, (12) Obama, on David Letterman, DIDN’T EVEN KNOW what our national debt was—all while he continues to spend OUR money.

Hey, but he’s a “likeable” guy, right, while Democrats accuse Conservatives of being radical and mean-spirited?

For comments, contact Barbara J. Carlson at Barbara@FortBendBusinessJournal.com.

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Posted by FortBendStar on Oct 3 2012. Filed under Conservative Voice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.