Congress only last year killed the 3 percent excise tax on long distance telephone bills—a tax imposed in 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American War.
As silly as a 108-year-old tax to fund a 19th century war might seem, another federal program that's outlived its purpose continues to cling to life after 72 years and could set a new record for obsolescence—and misuse—if not deep-sixed.
In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration to extend electricity and telephone service to America's remote farmlands. By all accounts, this jewel in FDR's sweeping New Deal agenda to lift Americans out of the ruinous Depression literally connected all of America.
The REA is unneeded today because transcontinental electricity and telephone grids reach 99 percent of the nation's farms. Worse, the REA's bureaucratic descendent, the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service, is now poised to heap abuse on the nation's air.
The RUS has pledged some $35 billion over the next 10 years to build coal-fired electric plants, whose air-fouling smokestack emissions could well negate all state and federal programs now in place to reduce greenhouse gases.
Furthermore, the Office of Management and Budget found that many of the proposed plants have nothing to do with serving remote farms. Beneficiaries of the $35 billion in low-interest money would include the expanding suburban areas of Dallas-Fort Worth, metropolitan Atlanta and upscale northern Virginia.
Congress should take aim at this outmoded program and prove that states' representatives genuinely care about ending government waste, fraud and abuse.
