File 13 the best place for ANY 'Fee Demo' bills or funding - Your tax dollars ... at play?
 
 
December 5, 2004
 
By Julie Kay Smithson
 
 
Many will recall days in the not-so-distant past when federal employees were polite, respectful and actually KNEW something factual about the playgrounds (recreational areas of America) where they worked. Not any more.
 
I attended a property rights conference in Las Vegas, NV, in March 2001. A friend (who has lived there for forty years) took me on a tour of the dam and reservoir. "Fee demo" was worse than a one-armed bandit and I saw it in action. Every place -- EVERY ONE -- that we pulled off the road to look at the water or surrounding area (my plans were to take photos of the low reservoir levels -- some Mister or Miz "Johnny on the Spot" federal employee swooped down to collect a five-dollar "Fee Demo" from my friend. The third time it happened, I told him that that was ENOUGH -- we didn't need any more of this new federal employee schoolyard bully crapola.
 
The bitter taste of this remains still. The fact that 'fellow Ohioan' Ralph Regula -- who, along with the obsessed Sen. DeWine, would have moved me from my home in rural Madison County, along with everyone else in a 56,000 - 223,000-acre area of the best soils in the state/world (where we raise food to FEED PEOPLE) -- was the 'head honcho' pushing this taxpayer theft does not sit well with me, either.
 
Doesn't anyone remember when taxpayer-funded federal appropriations actually made it to the bottom of the 'food chain' and PROVIDED things like toilet paper in the restrooms and wood chips on walking trails? The bigger thieves/thugs have grown so bold that they never allow the money that SHOULD be spent on the very things that the "Fee Demo" pushers say the new money will be spent on, to 'trickle down'. Nope. They're too busy stuffing their pockets (nest feathering) in a feeding frenzy of  insatiable greed.
 
These are my feelings about it, and why they are what they are.
 
I am not vitriolic about 'Fee Demo' -- I just see it for the stalking horse of taxpayer dollars that it is. It is just another tentacle in a beast that is never satisfied, no matter how much money is funneled into its gaping maw.