Running the government like a business
When it comes to government budget cuts, pain is relative. If you work for the government and you lose your job, those spending cuts hurt.
For everyone else, though, the specter of the government spending less money during a recession makes sense. The private sector has no problem freezing salaries, cutting jobs, making their employees take furlough days and other ways to get revenues and expenditures to line up.
Unlike the federal government, though, Virginia and her cities, counties and towns can’t spend more money than they have. So when a recession puts the brakes on the economic activities the state taxes — income from employment, retail sales, etc. — the Virginia response is always budget cuts.
This week, we learned that the state’s budget ax will mean 593 layoffs, cuts of up to 15 percent to the state’s universities and community colleges, the closing of two older state prisons and one juvenile facility and a mandatory one-day furlough for state employees as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine works to close a $1.35 billion hole.
“The commonwealth is continuing to manage the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression both responsibly and transparently,” Kaine said in a news release. “There’s no question we remain in the midst of the toughest economy in a generation. But we also remain confident that Virginia will weather the storm and emerge stronger than ever before.”
By that, Kaine means that Virginia continues to be considered one of the best managed states in the nation, our unemployment rate remains below the national average and the state has maintained its AAA bond rating despite the rough times.
In other words, we’re in bad shape — but better shape than most states.
What’s interesting about the proposed cuts is what’s being spared — K-12 education.
But that’s only happening because of money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — commonly referred to as the federal stimulus — is helping communities like Danville and Pittsylvania County keep their schools funded.
Obviously, we wouldn’t want the state government to borrow money to maintain spending for anything it does, but at the same time, few people with school-age children would want to see what their local schools would look like after a 15 percent budget cut.
For all the recession’s “pain,” what the state is really going through is an exercise in priorities and choices. If the Kaine administration and its successor properly use the economic lessons of the past two years, the state government will emerge from this recession leaner and smarter.
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It surely would be nice if the federal government followed the lead of Virginia. But the feds deal with OPM, and the notion of fiscal responsibility is not to be discussed. Mr Obama has an agenda, and that agenda requires a large number of “czars”, who answer to no one but him. And, naturally, each czar requires a large staff (how large, does anyone know?) The federal government is increasing, and it can only increase with large wads of taxpayer money. Money taken from the producers of the country, money which will ultimately be used to seize even more of the producers’ money, to “spread the wealth around”.
We, as a nation, are committing fiscal insanity. The Obama plan is comprised of virtually unlimited deficit spending in order to redistribute the wealth of the nation by further punishing those who make this country work.
Private enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than government has. Our great attempt to eliminate poverty, the “Oh, Great!“ Society, was going to wipe out poverty by declaring war on it.
How’d that work out? Not too happily for black Americans, the group which was supposed to benefit the most. They had been making real progress until 1964, when the War on Poverty had its first shot fired by LBJ. Since then, the black community has been plagued by all the usual social pathologies which could easily have been predicted before we replaced the black father with Uncle Sam. Illegitimacy, crime, drug use, dropping out of school, violence, all could have been predicted had anyone really stopped to think about it.
Now a newer generation of those same clowns are going to provide us with “affordable health care” by spending untold billions or even trillions of our money.
Not really our money. Our money was spent years ago, buying what 9 out of 10 taxpayer dollars buy, votes for the politician who hands out someone else’s dollar. There is great competition among politicians for those dollars, and at times they tend to look upon these dollars as being in endless supply.
They are wrong. Money does not have an endless supply, or at least not wealth. Neither does health care, and yet Obama says he will cover the needs of millions more patients and there will be no rationing of care. He knows, or should know, that he is lying when he says that. Anything which is not in infinite supply will be rationed in some way. It comes with the territory, one of those things which cannot not be. Health care will be rationed after the passage of any legislation, just as it is rationed today. The only question is whether the citizen or the government makes the decisions as to how that care is rationed. If the governmnt has that authority, they will have to deny treatment to someone in order that someone else can receive it. They will not be able to avoid it. There is a finite supply and an infinite demand for health care.
And if he is too stupid to realize this, or too dishonest to admit it, what about the rest of his plans, whatever they are? Does anyone know what his real plans are? I don’t. I can only make a guess by looking at what the people who have influenced him all his life are like.
We all know who they are: Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Van Jones, Saul Alinsky, people like that. People who are not overly fond of my country.
I don’t like the conclusions I reached. I don’t think our President likes this country any more than those men do, which is to say not at all.
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