In 1930, if you told big government progressives in coming years they would be able to charge taxpayers for weather while increasing the size and power of the federal government, I doubt you would have been believed.
People weren’t as credulous then.
Today common weather events are declared “disasters” and governors go to Washington begging for federal handouts. That’s how taxpayers in Minnesota and Wisconsin wind up paying for a snow storm in Virginia.
Since the first response of most Americans to a “disaster” is to offer to lend a hand, you’re probably thinking “those poor people,” trapped for weeks like Ernest Shackleton in the Antarctic.
You demand the government spare no expense mounting a rescue effort. In the meantime, the least the feds can do is drop food from helicopters like they did for those Montana cows.
You may also wonder why, in this time of Virginia’s obvious need, no one was sitting outside the grocery store soliciting funds for survivors.
In the meantime, without getting all "Pulp Fiction," you’d like to know some of the details of the disaster.
How can I make this account acceptable for mixed company?
Here’s the sequence of events: Northern Virginia received a winter storm alert. Weather people hyperventilated. Toilet paper disappeared. Snow fell for two days. Flakes landed on the roadway. Educrats canceled school. Teachers danced. Plows buried parked cars.
Mass transit became missing transit. Private sector workers slid to work. Teachers continued dancing for the rest of the week.
And that’s the sum total of the “disaster.”
Taking care of roads and preparing for weather is a state responsibility, not a federal responsibility. Paying for clearing state roads is the state’s job and the money should be raised from its taxpayers.
Yet the governors of Virginia and Maryland both rushed to declare winter weather a disaster, hoping Uncle Sam would foot the cleanup bill.
Monday Obama signed an executive order authorizing federal disaster aid and declaring any illegal alien hit by a snowflake is now a climate refugee.
This is the most inefficient way imaginable to pay for routine weather–related clean–up.
Tax dollars are taken from the states and shipped to Washington where the money wends its way through layer upon layer of the bureaucracy, each taking its cut, until the reduced sum is finally returned to the state, where the filtering process starts all over again.
It’s big government money laundering and the dollars always shrink.
It would be more efficient to grind up the currency, add a bit of salt and then spray the resulting mixture on the road.
The big government left encourages this dependency for a number of reasons.
One, it allows them to showcase their “compassion” using someone else’s money. Two, distributing millions for “disaster” relief “proves” the need for bigger and biggest government, because who else has the national reach to throw money at problems?
And finally, charging taxpayers for weather lets the administration claim that fighting “global warming,” is costing billions and something must be done.
Just as farmers grew crops for free before FDR, states felt they were capable of responding to events within their borders without sending Uncle Sam a bill.
As David McCullough wrote in his masterful “The Johnstown Flood” the state of Pennsylvania and private donors helped survivors and rebuilt after the 1889 flood that killed 2,209 people.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was met in full by California leadership, without any pleading for other taxpayers to foot the bill for people who choose to live over an earthquake fault.
Conservatives that think welfare only creates a sense of dependency among the poor are fooling themselves. Free money erodes the pride of governors, too.
The federal budget will never shrink and the size of government will never be reduced until the “problem solvers” we elect to the governor’s office start solving problems.
Republican governors getting in the welfare line with Democrats only serves to undermine the conservative case for federalism and returning the powers to the states that are granted in the Constitution.
There is nothing particularly menacing about snow in Virginia. Homeowners shovel the snow from their driveway. The state plows snow off the roadway. The only difference is the scale of the job. And who has the gall to ask for a check afterward.
Michael R. Shannon is a commentator, researcher (for the League of American Voters), and an award-winning political and advertising consultant with nationwide and international experience. He is author of "Conservative Christian’s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now with added humor!)." Read more of Michael Shannon's reports — Go Here Now.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.