Continuing the process of selling bits of America to the highest bidder, California is considering the use of electronic license plates that would turn vehicles into ad space available for sale:
The device would mimic a standard license plate when the vehicle is in motion but would switch to digital ads or other messages when it is stopped for more than four seconds, whether in traffic or at a red light. The license plate number would remain visible at all times in some section of the screen.
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Interested advertisers would contract directly with the DMV, thus opening a new revenue stream for the state, Price said.
"We're just trying to find creative ways of generating additional revenues," he said. "It's an exciting marriage of technology with need, and an opportunity to keep California in the forefront."
It is remarkable the lengths that politicians will go to avoid discussing the mature solutions to our budget shortfalls: undoing the tax cuts that the richest Americans have received over the past few decades, real health care reform that busts up Big Pharma and Big Insurance, criminal justice reform that ends the "War on Drugs" and stops the prison-industrial complex, and ending the wars and cutting back the military-industrial complex. But in the conservative mainstream media, those are dismissed as "tax and spend", "socialized medicine" (or the new nonsense word, "Obamacare"), "soft on crime", and "unpatriotic".