A New Motto

If the US is really to keep pace with the rest of the world, it's time to re-evaluate our national mottos, specifically the ones about the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Lets face it, the politicians and leadership of our last administration were guilty of frightening stupidity and cowardice, leaving us, as a friend says, in a fine pickle. People are losing their homes, unemployment is up, and financial institutions that were bailed out a scant few months ago using tax dollars are filing for Chapter 11 today. Home of the free? This nation has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any country in the developed world.

In 2007, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at year end -- 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.

State and federal prison authorities had jurisdiction over 1,610,584 prisoners at midyear 2008: 1,409,442 in state jurisdiction and 201,142 in federal jurisdiction.

Local jails held 785,556 persons awaiting trial or serving a sentence at midyear 2008. An additional 72,852 persons under jail supervision were serving their sentence in the community.

So, time for a new motto. I suggest, "Bigger Is Better." Here's why.

I live in Northern Virginia very close to Washington, DC. We have the third worst traffic situation in North America. Rush hour starts at 2 p.m. and goes both in and out of the Virginia suburbs. In recent times, the Tysons Corner area where I live has become one of the dotcom capitals, with tens of thousands driving to and parking their cars in one of the biggest unincorporated city in the country. We have minimal enforcement of existing High Occupancy Vehicle regulations; the cops stop cars when it's time to meet the ticket quota, but by and large the rules are ignored. One person, one car. Ten thousand folks, ten thousand cars. Because of the high traffic density, there is a constant need for road repairs, which further complicates the traffic patterns.

Politicians are loathe to tackle such issues. In America, it's not only your home that's your castle, it's your car, too. There are essentially no real incentives for car-pooling, so we build more roads but wait: with more roads come more people. With more people comes a need for more schools, more housing, more parking lots and malls and other impermeable surfaces causing more run-offs and more pollution both to the air and to the waterways. Places that were never problematic are now prone to erosion, and on and on. Damages are repaired--or, more likely, cobbled temporarily--by using more taxes. This is one of those frightening vicious circle, which gets ever bigger, ever more expensive, ever more dangerous.

Here's an idea: lets give people willing to run a car pool a free Kia van and gasoline vouchers. Lets give people willing to be in a carpool a tax break. Lets give employers who practice flex-time a break too. Lets give money to people who use their cars less than, say, 10,000 miles a year. Lets give people who use public transport a couple of extra paid days off a year, or remunerate them for their time and efforts.

There are quite a few interests involved here--developers, road builders, construction suppliers, politicians--more than willing to keep building (Bigger Is Better) and essentially saddling the coming generations with problems we should be solving now. Maybe our kids will need to find a motto of their own, something along the line of, "Thanks for Nothing, Folk."