Ray LaHood – Secretary Department of Transportation

August 22, 2009

Ray LaHood – Secretary
Department of Transportation
1200 New Jersey Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20590

Mr. Secretary,

Wimpy, Popeye’s perpetually needy friend, used to say, “I will pay you on Thursday for a hamburger I eat on Monday.”

After I heard you say, “Don’t worry. You’ll get your money”, I did some homework on your background.

There are some simple facts that are known to people who didn’t use the word “create” when they hired somebody. Once you have met a payroll or gone to the mat with a supplier or a customer or arm wrestled with a bank you know them. First and foremost is, and it should be obvious, is that a dollar on Monday is worth more than a dollar you might get on Thursday.

As far as I can tell from your published C.V. you have been a public servant all your life. Put differently, you latched on to the nearest lactating mammary you saw after you went to college and have never left it.

I owned a piece of a travel agency 25 years ago. The slowest paying customer was Marriott. I got to J. Willard Marriott’s secretary. “Why do you expect me to finance the Marriott Corporation?” was my oft asked but never answered question.

I listened to you say “Don’t worry. You’ll get your money.”

I can tell you that there are 1,000 car dealers out there who, believing what their government told them, acted as if a promise made, particularly by their government, would be a promise kept.

These people are adults. They knowingly took the risk of being stiffed by their own government. Whom can you believe if you can’t believe your own government?

This is the same government that is participating in an $11,000,000,000 loan for off shore drilling. Don’t worry about the Gulf of Mexico being polluted. The drilling will be off the coast of Brazil. Big Oil may be drilling there but they won’t own it so there will be no big tax paydays for the IRS. The borrower is Brazil. The government of Brazil? Why did we borrow money from the Chinese to lend it to Brazil?



Now the cash for clunkers is ending with no more than 5% of the moneys fronted by car dealers for the government being repaid.

The evidence of my own eyes suggests that if the United States government cannot manage a program whose sole function is to give away free money how in the name of reason can we expect them to manage health care?

God’s Holy Trousers but if you put them in charge of the desert in 6 months they’d be importing sand.

It’s too late now but why did you insist that the “clunkers” be destroyed? We should have sent a few boat loads of them to Cuba. Considering what mechanics there have done to keep 50 year old cars running they would have had a dozen of them in NASCAR next year.

You were a school teacher after college.

The most important thing then was to get tenure.

Nothing has changed.

Make sure you get my name on the White House “fishy” list.



Kevin Smith



PS – Was that your uncle in the Clint Eastwood movie?