Ahhhhh! Smell that?
That, my friends, is the smell of fresh air in our new, clean environment.
Don’t you just love the smell of fresh air? And there’s no better place to take it all in than in the Great Outdoors while standing on your front porch.
Unfortunately, that’s about as far as most of us will be able to get in the Great Outdoors in the not-too-distant future.
The nation’s Daddy — President Barack Obama — knows what’s best for you. Just ask him. He’ll lecture you all about it.
Sure, you’d like to make your own choices and set the course for your life, but you’re just being a rebellious teen-ager. Daddy’ll make those important decisions for you.
Like, for instance, what kind of car you may drive.
Daddy announced in May that he was unilaterally raising the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard on trucks from 23 mpg to 30 mpg and on cars from 27.5 mpg to 39 mpg by 2016.
That means that the average of all cars sold by each manufacturer must meet the mpg minimums. In his benevolence, Daddy will still allow manufacturers to sell sport utility vehicles and full-sized trucks, but automakers will necessarily have to charge more — a lot more — for those vehicles to chill demand and encourage sales of rubberband-powered, rolling cigar boxes.
That will have severe consequences for anglers and hunters who tow their boats to fish-filled lakes or their campers to hunting leases.
Getting your 24-foot Blazer Bay to Grand Isle just isn’t possible with the Chevrolet Volt that Daddy has decided you need to be driving. So you’ll have to hire Brinks to deliver all the money you’ll need to afford a new SUV or full-sized truck.
The law of unintended consequences is always in effect, and Daddy’s action will deal a severe body blow to the boat-manufacturing industry. You can’t buy a new bass boat if you can’t afford a vehicle to tow it.
In six months’ time, we’ve slipped into a bizarro world where the governments owns significant portions of our banks, our insurance, our automotive industry and, soon, our healthcare.
Maybe it also wants to own our boat-manufacturing industry.
Great. We’ll all be catching speckled trout from pirogues.
Email Todd Masson at toddm@lasmag.com
