There is one thing certain about the mainstream media, while they claim to be unbiased, they are anything but fair and balanced. They pick and choose who they interview and quote, how much space that source gets in an article, and they readily omit people they either don't agree with and want to hurt.
Let's look at a recent article in the Cowboy State Daily about the recent Joint Transportation, Highways and Military Affairs Committee meeting. Here's the link:
The blue-dots who are in leadership positions think it is a great idea to raise your fuel taxes. Their logic is that out-of-staters aren't paying their fair share in taxes to Wyoming, so we need to tax everyone more. But don't you and I also buy fuel in Wyoming and pay taxes on it? Why yes, we do. But they have a plan for that. You see, they're going to reduce your vehicle registration fees by $30 in return for increasing the tax on your fuel. The tax increase on fuel will have to offset the reduced registration fees, those fees they raised just a few years ago to improve their revenue.
Last year, the State of Wyoming had almost $2 BILLION in excess revenue. That's $2 billion that you paid in fees, sales taxes, property taxes, and everything else the State takes slice out of. Naturally, the blue-dots spent much of that excess and then bragged about putting a little bit of it in reserve investments. "Aren't we great! We saved your money!" (Looking at you, Representative Western.) Yet they can't wait to squeeze more money out of your wallet.
As Ronald Reagan famously said:
“Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
In its report on the committee meeting, Cowboy State Daily had this to say about Sheridan Representative Ken Pendergraft:
Rep. Ken Pendergraft, R-Sheridan, was one of the most vocal skeptics of the fuel tax and called the proposal “unconscionable” because of the rampant inflation impacting people.
“I just want to point out that those who are paying this tax are affected by the same inflation we’re affected by here,” Pendergraft said. “When you look at an agency or you look at a business, either one, you have to look at both sides of the equation, how much money do we have coming in? What assets do we have to do that?”
Pendergraft suggested taking a reverse course of action and reducing the current diesel tax in the state to help with inflation.
“From a businessman’s perspective, from a homeowner’s perspective, we’re facing unprecedented — at least the last 40 years — inflation,” he said.
While we can't speak for you, it seems to us like Representative Pendergraft is voicing the concerns of most Wyoming citizens.
First they hobble us with huge property tax increases and now they want to increase the cost of fuel too, on top of the Bidenomics driven inflation. What they fail to realize is that increasing the price of fuel makes EVERYTHING more expensive! Last we looked, virtually all the goods people need to survive in Wyoming are transported by trucks that run on diesel fuel. So let's make diesel prices even higher!
Our hometown paper, The Sheridan Press, failed to even mention that Representative Pendergraft was at this committee meeting. Lazily, they just reprinted the article from the Cheyenne paper. They are either incompetent journalists or they don't want us to know that Pendergraft is fighting for us against the blue-dots. We bet it's a little of both. The easy thing to do is just grab an article from an affiliate newspaper and print it. Actually reviewing and checking the article takes manpower and money, things The Press doesn't have. How hard is it to take a list of what legislators are on various committees and give the Sheridan legislators a call for comments after each meeting?
The Press may say that certain elected officials and party representatives won't talk to them, and this is true. It comes from a long-established pattern of misquoting people and reporting things out of context. Why waste time talking to someone who is going to twist your words into something you didn't mean and make you look bad? Can you blame people for shunning them? Trust is earned.
Being the fair and balanced reporters that we are, bringing you what others won't say, we'll leave you with this quote from Representative Pendergraft when we asked him how the meeting went: "It was a Fuster-Cluck."
UPDATED 9/5/23: For more information on the attempt to increase your fuel taxes, check out The Ramble Room podcast.
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