Oh Goodie! Another Law 
     As reported by HotelManagement.net it seems there are many dodgy websites taking hotel reservations when they don’t have or represent an actual hotel. I’m guessing they’re taking some kind of advance deposits, or maybe total advance payments. This is deplorable, and this e-mail warning was a good thing. 
     This scamming of travelers has come to the attention of our elected geniuses in Congress, so both the Senate and the House have bills pending. One being House bill 4526 (we don’t have a number for the Senate bill) to curb this illicit behavior on the part of these dastardly scammers. 
     According to Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, “This bill intends to crack down on crooks and fraudsters who trick consumers into booking hotel rooms that don’t exist. 
    So we’re getting another law - and this is what I can see happening. To write these bills takes congressional staff people and these staff people need assistants, researchers, and transcribers. To manage such a group there needs be administrative people, such as an administrator, a personnel manager, and a budget compliance officer who needs to be at least a CPA or this group will not be able to hold up their heads in the staff cafeteria. They’ll need a person to monitor the group’s compliance with all federal laws and regulations. Considering the complexity of the laws and regulations, this compliance officer needs to be an attorney. 
     The first thing this attorney will determine is which laws and federal regulations this department needs to follow. It seems to be well accepted that federal departments are not necessarily bound by the laws and regulations Congress has passed for the benefit of those companies out there who can’t be trusted, and therefore need all the laws and regulations. 
     Even with his selective interpretation of the need to comply with their own laws and regulations, the attorney has plenty to do, so much so that he needs his own staff, including a couple investigators to suss out the people in his department who willfully violate the laws he decides they are going to adhere to. Now they’re ready to write the bills. The cost will probably exceed forty million dollars.
     Once the bills are passed and signed into law, the need for some serious money becomes evident. The FBI needs a sub-department to uphold this new law and ride herd on the scumbags who are scamming the poor travelers, who it seems are too slow to just heed a simple warning and protect themselves, but need their government to do it for them. 
      So now the FBI has a new small sub-department. They demand an adjustment to their budget, which of course they get. We can’t expect all these additional people to work for free. Then there is the liaison with Homeland Security, who is overseeing the FBI, (that takes several new people), and then there is the congressional oversight committee. Of course, the congressmen are already being paid, (boy howdy are they being paid!), so the only additional expense to us taxpayers for their involvement is the cost of flying the thirteen committee members to Aruba twice a year. Of course along with them they need staff people, security people, secure communications equipment and people, and their significant others, so they can meet in an atmosphere conducive to the seriousness of being brought up-to-date on how the new department is working. This takes a week. The meetings take three hours. 
     Now the cost of all this consumer protection is only double what the scammers were taking in the first place, but now instead of the poor scammed travelers carrying the whole economic load of being scammed, that cost is being spread over the whole tax-paying public. To balance that is the fact that 158 people now have jobs who didn’t have a prayer of getting employed by employers who didn’t have their paws in the public trough, and instead were forced to make a profit in order to stay in business. 
     Now all that needs to be done is to have this repeated 847 times each year so the President can brag about all the new jobs being created by his/her administration. And with all that effort and money, the FBI has stopped almost 10% of – to paraphrase the good senator – those crooks and fraudsters who trick consumers into booking hotel rooms that don’t exist. 
     And so it goes.