Balancing The Budget

I used to be a conservatist for a long time, but when my kids got in school and Ronald Reagan became governor of California, I started to become disallusioned. He first cut the budget for education, because, he said, there was waste in the education system. It did nothing to cut the waste. The waste stayed and the cuts descended down to the student level, and there the cuts have mounted for the past thirty years.

California school systems were always among the top three in the nation until Mr. Reagan and the ensuing govenors continued the trend and continued cutting the educational budget. The ranking of the systems of California in relation to the rest of the country has fallen until it is one of the lowest. Yet, its administrators from the governors on down are among the highest paid in the country. This has continued for over thirty years until this past year.

Now they blame the kids for not being able to read or do math or getting into college and having to take so much remedial subjects that are basic. They tie the hands of the teachers and principles and then blame them for the failure of the children to be educated.

This is just one area. In the case of welfare, it is far too large and needs to be reformed. But those same individuals that supported Mr. Reagan and the others in all the budget cuts throughout the years now want to just cut it off altogether. "Make them go out and find jobs." But the problem is that these people are on welfare for various reasons. There are the middle aged and senior citizens who were let go with all the downsizing, and they are not wanted in the job market place. They end up on welfare because they have families and no where to turn. Others are have no job skills, they don't know what to do. There are no jobs, and when a job opening occurs three hundred people show up for a handful of jobs.

So we do away with welfare, what happens to those unable to work or find jobs? What happens to the Weather Service, and the predictions for tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, floodings, and all the rest? What happens to our air traffic when the balance budget demands that we have to have fewer air traffic contrllers? And in the meantime the unemployment swells as more people are put out of work. We will have a balanced budget, but the rest of the country will be a mess.

In this enlightened times, we should be thinking of more enlightened means and ways instead of reverting back to the dark ages, where the rich are rich and the poor and poor, and nothing in between. We need to cut the welfare to the big corporations, such as the tobacco industry, the companies who send lobbyists to Washington and seduce our elected representatives to betray us to them for their means. And it is obscene to see so many poor and homeless people in this country when there are so many CEO's, athletes, entertainers, and others who really contribute not that much making multi-million dollar salaries.

When a human life is worth less than the yield of a stock to a shareholder. When the customer, client, citizen is worth less than those producing the product, we need to go back to the ideals of our founding fathers and make our motto "In God We Trust" stand for something. Otherwise we are no better than the Hitlers, the Czars, the dictators, the Communists and every other demagogue down through history, because this is exactly what they all did.