Memo to David Strom and the Minnesota Taxpayers League: YOU ARE DUMB.
Man, where to start with the verbal beatings? It's not easy. See, the Minnesota Taxpayers League is, basically, a handful of old, white rich guys who are tired of paying their accountants to get them out of paying taxes. They want to eliminate the middleman. So they started a little group, a little millionaire's club, to bitch and moan every time the government collects taxes for stuff they don't personally get anything out of.
Complete bastards, of course. But they're taken seriously by the current administration and the media, so every time they bitch about something, we have to listen to them. For example. Right now, we're in the midst of a bus drivers' strike. That means no buses. That means that those of us who choose to bus to work have to drive, and those who have no choice in the matter are fucked. They're striking because, thanks the Taxpayers League, our ass of a governor got into office on a "no new taxes" platform. And then he cut transit funding. And so they want to screw over the bus drivers by jacking up their health care costs by hundreds of dollars. Is that the acrid taint of compassionate conservatism I detect wafting across the state? I believe it is.
To prepare for the strike, everyone was told to be good citizens and try to work from home and try to carpool and try to change their work hours to keep everything from going to hell. Which we did. Well, not me. I figured that playing-nice bullshit is counterproductive to the point, which is to actually make things as unpleasant as possible for people who drive so that they'll appreciate the buses almost as much as the people who ride them. And in a SHOCKING TWIST, I was right.
After two days without an urban apocalypse, along comes David Strom, president and founder of the Taxpayers League: ""Transit just isn't that important to the smooth functioning of the Twin Cities transportation system. That's the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the lack of chaos engendered by the bus-system strike."
This is classic arch-conservative fuckhead thinking. Buses, and I know this may sound radical, exist in no small part for the PEOPLE THAT RIDE THE BUSES. They're not magical Traffic Boxes that keep poor people bundled up out of the sight, and out of the way, of rich people's luxury cars.
On top of that, there's the fact that, like I said above, everyone's been following the directions to play nice and carpool and work from home. That won't last, because people are basically selfish bastards who'll only put up with the hassle of riding with people they barely know into downtown for just so long before they say to hell with it and buy a car.
That's the other thing. Without buses, a lot more people would have to actually -get- cars. Unlike millionaire Strom, most people can't up and buy a car on two day's notice. Of course, the Taxpayers League has a brilliant solution to this - buy everyone used cars with the transit money! It'd only cost $5,000 per person, and then we could stick all those annoying poor people with repair and insurance bills. Oh, and keep non-citizens from getting licenses to drive the cars we're giving them. If people only listened to the Taxpayers League, government could be fucking over more with less!
Let's just pretend, for a moment, that Strom's idea weren't utterly delusional. If you need to smoke a little crack to get into that mindset, go ahead, we'll wait. So now all the poor people in the state have '97 Saturns with 75,000 miles on 'em. What does he actually think the traffic situation would be like once all these cars hit the roads? Face it. Eventually, a certain someone's Mercedes would be stopped dead on 35E, surrounded by the Great Unwashed in their Saturns as he tried to get to the state capital to lobby for his latest evil scheme.
At which point Strom would probably buy a fucking helicopter, and use public money to install a helipad in downtown St. Paul. Because if it's not completely evident yet, he's a bit of an asshole.
Now that I think of it, does anyone know of anyone out there, named Strom, who isn't a complete scumbag waste of skin? I'm curious, because I have a theory that everyone named Strom is a worthless scumbag waste of skin, and I'd like to see how well it holds up.
For using your power and influence to fuck over hundreds of thousands of people, and then brushing it off because you, personally weren't affected, David Strom is hereby added to the growing ranks of the DUMB.