Sunday, September 28, 2008

Rural Connectivity Administration

Obama is talking big about putting major investment into bringing broadband to rural communities. It sounds awful familiar. Remember the Rural Electrification Administration? It was the commission that was charged with building electrical lines to small rural communities and little houses on the prairie. And it never went away. It continued taking taxpayer money and adding bureaucracy to the top of rural electrical co-ops. When we still had a significant number of fiscal conservatives in the House, this was a target of their scorn. The slick squirrels in Washington eventually changed the name to the Rural Utility Service to obfuscate the fact that it was a worthless hanger-on bureaucracy. Now Barack Obama wants to add a Rural Connectivity Administration to the mess. Expect it to last well past the destruction of the economy of the country.

To be fair to the New Deal Socialists and the Hope and Change Socialists, the Rural Electrification Administration was and is, and the Rural Connectivity Administration will be a tiny fraction of the Federal Budget. But it's a key example of how nothing that Washington gives us ever goes away, even when it's outlived its usefulness.

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