Sigh…

WASHINGTON - Four lucky states were slated to share billions in potential royalties courtesy of an offshore drilling expansion signed into law last year, money that could help reverse decades of environmental damage from coastal industry. But as budget planning gets under way, the states are beginning to realize that Congress gave them far more freedom in spending the windfall than the political rhetoric in Washington suggested.

Particularly, one little-noticed sentence in the legislation allows the states to use their money on “onshore infrastructure projects” to mitigate outer continental shelf activities. Translation: They can use it to pave roads, erect bridges, lay water lines or finish just about any other public works projects they can link to the coast.

“It is very tempting,” said Bill Walker, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources. “I would not be surprised as these funds begin to come in and get larger and larger that there will be people at the state level saying, ‘We need to do this or that or the other thing.’ We’ll try to keep them focused on doing environmental and conservation things, but they make the rules.”

Louisiana lawmakers moved last year to bar the state from using the drilling revenues for anything but wetlands and coastal preservation. Voters passed a referendum cementing the arrangement.

But the other three states — Alabama, Mississippi and Texas — have no such restrictions.

This is the problem with allowing our government to tax us, or otherwise seize profits from private enterprise, in order to fund initiatives for the “greater good.” We can’t trust the politicians to actually do the things they said they were going to do with the money they take.  Aside from these government royalties making our prices at the gas pump more expensive than they need to be, which is something I’ve explained before, most of them aren’t going to be spent in the way our politicians told us they would be.

And this happens all the time.  Look at excise taxes on things like cigarettes.  Those taxes were created with the promise that the funds would go toward solving public health problems.  Yet does it?  Not very often.  Usually that money found its way elsewhere.  And what about Social Security taxes?  Every one of us who draws a paycheck pays those taxes with the expectation that the money will go to help the elderly in their declining years, yet in years past a lot of that money paid into SS has been used to fund other projects.

So when the Democrats tell us that they want to fund alternative energy initiatives with massive new taxes on the oil industry, should we believe them?  I don’t think we should, because I don’t think politicians are capable of making those sorts of decisions honestly and free from the influence of lobbyists.  My guess is that if the Democrats got their way, a good deal of the money from the tax would be spent on things which have nothing to do with energy while the rest was spent on alternative energy projects backed by whichever lobbyists did the best job wooing the right politicians (as opposed to which alternative energy projects would, you know, be the best for this country).

Long story short, we should be careful about asking the government to take care of us or solve problems.  Because generally, given historical trends, the government is pretty frickin’ awful at that sort of thing.