They said NO!…

The City Fathers in Colorado Springs, CO came up with a budget. It contained a $28 million deficit, so they asked voters to approve a whopping tax increase. The voters said NO!

So the city is cutting out every third streetlight, removing public trash barrels and crews won’t be mowing the grass in city parks, among other cutbacks.

Some voters are wondering if there is an element of retaliation in the budget choices. Never mind that.

Expect that other voters in other places are also going to be saying “NO” to government spending and expecting their elected officials to come up with reasonable choices to save money.

Eventually, they may get the message. It’s about time.

Business as usual…?

The New York Times says that Congress included about $100 billion for education in the stimulus law last year. The idea was to cushion the recession’s impact on schools and to help fuel an economic recovery. That money will run out by the end of this school term.

What does that mean? State and local tax revenues are still in decline. The end of the federal money will leave big holes in education budgets across the nation. Golly gee.

“States are going to face a huge problem because they’ll have to find some way to replace these billions, either with cuts to their K-12 systems or by finding alternative revenues,” said Bruce Baker, an education professor at Rutgers University.

Ah, Bruce? Alternate revenues? You mean higher taxes to fund bloated budgets, smaller class sizes and teacher aides? Some of us think not. One local elementary school that we know capped class sizes at 12 students some years back. That’s less than half the number that teachers from a generation ago sometimes dealt with.

Can we afford that sort of thing? No, we cannot. We have exhausted the federal budget, exhausted local taxpayers and achieved no significant better teaching results.

It’s past time to stop thinking that taxation is a solution. Cutting budgets and working harder to get the job done is a more rational approach. No more business as usual, protected jobs

Get on with it.

Watch the morph…

From conservative Republican to…

Now that so called ordinary Americans are rearing their ugly heads in opposition to big government and more taxes, the Tea Party movement seems to have grown legs.

And that’s a good thing. It’s way past time for ordinary folks to stand up and shout.

But watch out. All those folks who are embedded in political life are not sleeping. They are morphing into whatever it takes to get elected and stay elected. Palin and McCain suddenly showed up at the Tea Party Copngress looking for a piece of the action. They aren’t the first and they won’t be the last to try to get on the bus.

Kick them off. No regular politicians need apply. This one is for the rest of us.

Do the math…

Algae is nicer than coal. Bio is better than gasoline? Solar is so clean.

In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick is planning to drop $20 million into solar panels that will provide the equivalent of energy for 600 homes and save $650,000 a year. Sounds good until you get out the calculator.

In 20 years, the panels, if they last that long, will have produced some $13 million worth of electricity. Does no one wonder about the other $7 million?

Someone should suggest that the alternative energy crowd should go away and come back later, after they have figured out how to produce market-rate electricity and gasoline or diesel equivalents that cost less than diesel.

Green is a lovely color, but most Americans just cannot afford another buck a gallon for doing the right thing when they do not have jobs.

From Obama’s playbook…

The president added a page to his playbook the other day when he admitted that sending a man to the moon is a nice idea – but costly.

He’d still like to go, but, he said, private companies will have to pay the freight, not our overburdened federal treasury. Now that sounds like a plan that might get some traction.

Now, turning to the private sector may be an odd move for Obama, but hey, it makes sense. In the private sector, money comes from profits, not taxes. Profits come from assessing and meeting market demand, from charging more than the cost of production for items sold. OK, in this government-enabled economy (boy that worked real well) we are more used to asking for a grant than grinding it out the old-fashioned way. If an idea is not economic, a private company will either not do it, or will lose money and leave the playing field.

None of this “raise fees, raise taxes and do it anyway” sort of stuff.

Maybe the president will take a page from his own playbook and start getting government out of more places that it doesn’t belong. That would be one way to start bringing down the deficit.

Up there in Massachusetts…

Here’s the problem…

Alethea Pieters, a spokeswoman for Massachusetts Gov. Duval Patrick’s economic stimulus office, said yesterday that public sector jobs are “as important, if not more important” than private sector jobs because of the “critical services” some of them provide, such as schoolteachers, police and firefighters.

It turns out the state spent most of its federal jobs stimulus money keeping state employees working, not on private sector jobs. More evidence that the folks in government just don’t get it? You bet.

A government “job” is just a paycheck funded by the rest of us. A “job” is created when you make some thing new, or make more of something that people need and are willing to pay for. Government jobs are an illusion of financial security that have dragged this economy into the ditch.

More important? Absolutely not.

Got it? Get it. Spend it.

In one small town not so far away, the guy in charge has started talking about the next annual budget.

The proposed budget includes the use of all local revenue available and will still require spending cuts.

Well OK. Most town managers think pretty much the same way. If there is cash to be had, get it and spend it. If state or federal money is also available, get that and spend that too. That’s how it is done. No thought to actually spending less next year.

Someone should tell these morons that leaving a little cash on the table for the taxpayers would do more to fix the economy than a few more borrowed billions for badly-aimed stimulus packages.

But they just don’t get it. And they may not, until it really is way too late.

Cutting from the bottom?

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg floated his budget plan for the coming year recently. Budget deficits loom. Despite all the warning signs, the budgets are still getting bigger. Only the rate of increase has slowed.

Thus spake the mayor: The only way the city could make up for the shortfall projected … would be to lay off thousands of employees, close 15 senior centers and end financing for 500 soup kitchens and food pantries, the mayor said.

Of course, the mayor himself, who made a considerable fortune in business, would hardly be affected by such cuts. But here’s even more evidence that people in government are disconnected from reality.

Old people? Can’t afford them. Hungry people? Forget about it. In tough times, government has to spend its resources on necessaries, right? Like clerks. Like more teacher aides. Like code enforcement and collecting taxes and license fees that drive small businesses out of business. Like salaries for top administrators.

Obama was right. It IS time for a change. But that’s not happening. Too little, too late and we are all in real trouble.

The gullible republic…

Speak and they will believe you.

President Obama is going to freeze discretionary spending as a way to start cutting down that pesky deficit. He said so.

And one day later, the president announced a plan to spend, yes spend, $8 billion on building high speed rail. Create some jobs, he said.

High speed rail is to transportation as lobster is to the family table. Who needs it? Fancy rich guys in expensive suits in a hurry to get to their next meeting? The rest of us? Not so much. Not a lot. Not at all.

Get it? Got it. Nobody is lying, really. It’s just that our fearless leaders actually believe they can spend their way to prosperity. Hey, it works for them, right?

Truth is that government can create paychecks using our money. But government doesn’t really create jobs.
That government creates jobs is a bankrupt notion – just like we will be unless someone actually starts spending (and borrowing) less money in Washington and in state government and in Town Hall.

Pack a small bag…

A word of advice for Massachusetts’ newest US senator. Pack a small bag when you go to Washington. And remember who hired you.

The Jan. 19 vote was no Republican landslide, it was a “We don’t like Martha” outing. There was no larger political agenda, just a recognition that politics has become too complicated, too filled with party edicts and too little responsive to the real problems that ordinary people are facing.

One can only hope that Scott Brown will be a humble and effective public servant and resist the temptation to join up with the in-crowd down there in DC.