Pop quiz for politicians- why are you just now discovering that it wastes gas and tax dollars for a public servant to leave their car running while they spend their lunch break in a restaurant? Why weren't you talking to those who report to you about personal use of public vehicles when gas was at $2 a gallon? Just curious, but I digress…

As I understand it, the wheel tax would have been $25. Doesn't sound like much but I don't think some of these counties could pass a 25 cent wheel tax right now, people are just that sick and tired of being hit up for yet more money by the government.

But they are also sick and tired of driving on shoddy roads and those who are coherent enough to think it through realize that you are not going to generate first rate jobs with a third rate transportation system. You see, the people who create most of the good paying jobs are usually rich and rich people don't like to drive on one-lane cow paths that only a drunk comedian or a sober politician would call a road. A simple question Miami and Fulton County citizens might want to ask themselves- what industry other than confined feeding operations would want to locate on some of these jokes we call roads?

As I pointed out at the beginning of the month, the average wage in this country has stagnated for the last quarter century while the cost of living has doubled. People have dealt with that reality in a variety of ways, one of which for some was to pick up a couple of hundred bucks a week by investing 15-20 hours of driving through the countryside delivering newspapers. I know this because I have years of experience doing exactly that for the Kokomo, Logansport and Peru newspapers.

Nobody does it to get rich, but it was one of the ways a lot of people in this country were able to augment the wages from their primary job. For some, those who were willing to put in 5 or 6 hours a night, it was a full time job. The name of the game was numbers. If you had a route that wasn't scattered all over the countryside and you could put out a couple of hundred papers an hour at a rate of 20 cents or more per paper, you could take home over a hundred bucks per night. That's tax-free because you deduct everything including your gas, rubber bands, plastic bags and maintenance on the car. At one point several years back I was delivering five routes for three different newspapers- two afternoons and a morning edition. This took about 5 hours out of my day and after I paid for my gas I had around $500 in my pocket. Not bad for a 30 hour workweek.

However as more and more newspapers look at the rising cost of delivery, more and more are going to a mailing service rather than adjust their subscription rates and/or pay the drivers more. Many are also consolidating their printing operations, so one printer may be serving two or three newspapers which results in some drivers getting their papers later. In many cases that meant that a full-time job that started at 5,6 or 7am made keeping a route as a part time job impossible. That's why I quit- when the paper I was delivering started coming from the printer in Grant County instead of Wabash County it took three hours away that I had to have in order to get back to the station for my primary job.

I don't know how many people there are in this country who deliver newspapers from their car but I know how many there will be ten years from now and that's zero. For many of these people, the loss of a part-time (in many cases full-time) income will be the tipping point that puts them on the public dole in some manner. I can't tell you how many young couples I've known who would pull up at the dock at 2am every morning with a baby in the back seat, picking up several hundred papers so they could head out into the night to dodge Bambi, spread the news, and try to make a living. At the very least it will mean a loss of income for the local economy, especially the auto mechanics and tire dealers in our lives, as less income means less spending power.

There are a variety of folks one can blame for this turn of events, including the decision makers at the newspapers themselves. For years I would tell whoever were in charge of circulation that delivering a product on a daily basis out to the boondocks at basically the same price as someone pays who lived a block from where the product was made was more than a little cockeyed, especially when the cost of delivering that product was going through the roof. They didn't listen of course. I was just the guy who was watching pieces of his car fly off every morning on the Macy/Gilead road.

One could also blame the big oil companies for hiking the price of gas. Actually, it's fun to blame them for pretty much anything. It has gotten rather old as year after year they told us the price was going up because they were changing their refining process to fit the season but it never seemed to go back down then after the changeover.

Yet it wasn't the newspapers or the oil companies that had me buying a new set of tires every third week or new wheel bearings every fall or new brake pads every two months or a new suspension system every spring.

It was the roads. If not for what it took for me to put my car back together on a regular basis, the paper could have cut my rate by a third and I still would have made enough money to make it worth my while.

As far as the 4-legged terrorists with the creepy horns on their heads are concerned, the truth is that trying to dodge a deer that's made his mind up to assault your car on some of these roads is more dangerous than just letting the stupid thing head-but your door and take your lunch money.

The unpleasant reality is that for the last several years if you were delivering newspapers on a rural route you either were driving something big that got lousy gas mileage and could take Bambi in a no-disqualification cage match or something small that couldn't take being driven on these roads every day. Either way, anyone who thinks their newspaper is coming with the mail because the delivery driver was overpaid needs to consult with their enchanted pillow some more.

Which brings me back to the wheel tax.

The mind swims at how much more money we pay for food, lumber, home electronics and virtually any other product you could name because of the maintenance costs of the delivery vehicles the venders have to use on these roads. We love to blame the farmer or the oil tycoon for the high cost of food but we forget that that cost goes up every time the person delivering your milk or bread or eggs has to stop and change a tire or call in a busted oil pan after discovering a new chasm on his route. I've lost count of how many times I've seen a school bus or a step-side van trapped in an ever widening gash across some unpaved road because it rained a few inches and technology that's been around since ancient Rome is deemed too expensive for 2008.

I'm not for or against a wheel tax in Fulton County because I don't live in Fulton County, but I have delivered newspapers on the roads in Fulton, Howard, Cass, Grant, Wabash and Miami counties and if you want to see the real life consequences of having to make a living on the roads in our area just drive around in a few years and see how many newspaper tubes are still mounted next to people's mailboxes.

Yes, it's expensive to pave and maintain roads. What I hope you understand is that it will become even more so, and not just because your county government has to bid against Chinese provincial governors and Kashmir warlords for the dwindling supply of petroleum based pavement products.

Yes, China and India are industrializing. Because they are industrializing on an upward curve they are draining more and more of the world's energy supplies. What does this have to do with the quality of your roads, much less your quality of life? Well I can tell you this: as you are reading these words the Chinese army is combing the countryside, looking for any damaged dams in the aftermath of their recent earthquake. Many of those dams provide power and for every one that's damaged and has to go offline the Chinese government will have to buy that much more oil. When they see that you can deliver more relief by roads than by air, they'll go on another of their famous infrastructure tears. All of which will drive up the price oil again and that's on top of the constant rise we have because they were already building roads and factories and cities and bus lines and airplanes and all the things that consume oil, including plastics my boy, plastics.

So, two billion people who were living in huts lit with candles a half-century ago now want to live like you do and they have the money to buy the oil to get it done. By the by, if you want to know where they get the cash to do all this and ramp up their military just check out where your birthday and Christmas presents were made.

But again, it's not just China or India who are driving up the cost of your gas. They're part of it to be sure but one simply must ask the question: why is diesel fuel about half as expensive in Mexico as it is here? Does the law of supply and demand that is supposedly driving the price up here in the good ol' USA not exist south of the Rio Grande? Sorry kids, it doesn't wash. Somebody somewhere is getting rich by destroying this economy and the effects are going to be felt across the board, not just in our county highway system.

If you want to truly understand how bad this is going to get, take a moment and look around. Start with your shoes, including the tips of the laces, then move on to your clothes, your jewelry, the carpet, the furniture, the TV, the computer, the walls and everything on them, the ceiling tiles, the shingles, the outside vinyl siding, the paved driveway, the lawn mower, the car, the street- just let your mind visit everywhere you go and everything you wear and everything you consume through the normal day and you'll see that it's either made of petroleum products, uses them while functioning, or burns them while being delivered to you. After you've done all that, take a trip to the landfill- every piece of plastic that was tossed in the trash over the last several decades is money we've given to the big oil boys, money we paid for stuff that we threw away.

I'm not being dramatic. I've talked to people who make a living calling other people to collect on student loans, credit cards, and all manner of debt collection that doesn't involve something that can be repossessed or a utility that can be shut off. They tell me their days are filled with listening to folks who are saying something like this- “Yes, I owe you money. But since you can't shut off my cable or take my car or my house, you are now last on my priority list because I can't pay you, pay my taxes, pay for the car, keep the lights on and feed my kids. Yes, my credit rating will tank but if it's a choice between that and food on the table or a working telephone, guess what?”

The numbers don't lie. The government cannot afford all the stuff we're spending money on now, they can't afford the stuff we've promised to spend money on, and because the wages are stagnant while prices climb and good paying jobs go overseas, the money available to the government after we pay for our lives (the tax base) is shrinking. All while the ratio of retirees to workers is climbing through the roof as people live longer and the boomers retire.

The feds can borrow the money so future Hoosiers can pay for these promises, which they do, or they can cut money sent down to the states, which they do, but we current Hoosiers have a Constitution that says to balance our budget now, regardless of what happens in D.C. or how high gas goes. This means we either get big tax increases that we don't have the money for if we decide to buy things like food or clothes, or we get budget cuts that are guaranteed to raise primal howls from every “group” that thinks their priorities are more important to mankind and western civilization than any other under the sun, or we get some combination of both that will leave us in this never-never land that we currently occupy. That is if we can rip our attention away from the earth-shattering matter of whether Ellen marrying her girlfriend in San Diego will ruin life as we know it in Evansville.

Ask any person in state or county government who has truly thought through what the public can afford on the wages they're making and they will tell you that there are big-time budget cuts on the horizon. They know it's coming and because the experience of being tarred and feathered is one they'd rather avoid, you will be amazed at how badly they want your opinion before they take action.
There will be town hall meetings, studies, committees, polls, and midnight calls to the psychic hotline from the legislature as these people, who have spent several decades promising you more than you can afford, turn themselves inside out trying to find out which cuts you'll tolerate. That is precisely why you don't have a wheel tax, Fulton County; your government listened to those who made the case against it.

As I say, I'm neither for nor against the wheel tax. However, I am anticipating with glee the entertainment I'll be getting from all the politicians- state, federal and local- as they spend the next several years coming to grips with this problem. For you see, gentle readers, some in our government actually do have a grip on reality and are afraid that with this apparently permanent upward curve in the price of petroleum we've reached a point of no return on our self-inflicted forced march to the land of hard-chosen priorities. As someone who has been reporting on this stuff for fifteen years, and paying for it with my taxes for 27 years, I'm pretty certain they're correct in that analysis.

Regardless of whether you do the math with a wheel tax, income tax, property tax, sales tax or a tax on all small fuzzy animals, the laws of mathematics still say that one plus one does equal and will always equal two, no matter how many times somebody claims otherwise. The laws of reality and politics say that all revenue streams for every level of government originate in the headwaters that are located in the taxpayer's wallet.

So this reporter's imagination tingles when I ponder what will go through the average Hoosier's head as more and more politicians are forced by mathematics and reality to look their constuents and say the following: