Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs!

What about that guy? You know, the guy at work who doesn’t have nearly enough to do? The supervisor or administrator who, when he comes to work every day, has no idea how he’ll fill eight hours, so he fills it dreaming up ways to make your work more difficult, costly and annoying?

If there was ever any doubt in your mind that Washington D.C. is overflowing with those guys, it should be dispelled now. The Federal Highway Administration has published an updated Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and has decided that innumerable lives will be saved through improved readability if every traffic sign in America has capital letters on only the first letter of each word in every sign. Presumably this means that all “STOP” signs will, hereafter, read “Stop.”

According to New York City Officials, replacing all of their traffic signs, at about $110 per sign, will cost some $27.6 million dollars. NYC bureaucracy and union work rules being what they are, it will probably cost $276 million. One shudders to think of the national costs, but as Senator Everett Dirksen said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Of course to the Obamites, trillion is the new billion. Imagine the horror if they ever find out what comes after trillion.

This new regulation has been brought to you only indirectly by Congress which can’t be bothered to read the bills they write and vote for, or to pay attention to the enormously destructive powers they give unelected federal bureaucrats. This is the brave new hopenchange world of leftist bureaucrats unleashed to regulate every aspect of our lives, for our own good of course, because we’re so stupid that without lower case traffic signs, we’ll drive headlong into fixed objects.

As so much of the offal that issues from the Federal lower regions, this is clearly an example of a complete lack of common sense and real world experience. Only the Federal Government could decide that signs are easier to read at any distance with smaller, lower case letters, and that lives will thereby be saved. Credit is due, however, because they are, at least, being consistent. They also believe that we can get out of debt by--wait for it--going more deeply into debt! The next thing you know, they’ll be trying to convince the public that you can insure millions of people who don’t have insurance and it will cost less, or that under Obamacare, you can keep your insurance and doctor!