No accounting for accountability
It certainly is annoying to see our government continually entrenched in a no-win face-off between disparate elements of ideology. Yet we continually hear people say that all will be well, as soon as we find some common ground. Here’s a clue: we don’t have common ground.
The grandiose secular America that the far Left dreams about is as opposite as you can get from the far Right’s penny-pinching, ignorance adulating, faux-religious political agenda.
If the Left wants more movement in their direction, i.e. more education, more support for the homeless, destitute and incapable, it should consider not getting pissed off about the expected minutia of things that don’t really risk the success of their primary objectives. If you really care about feeding people that can’t feed themselves, then maybe that should take priority over a 4% increase in teachers’ pay, teachers who are already eating, warm, and by most American standards, have excellent healthcare.
If the Left really cared about education, maybe realizing that part of the problem is that parental involvement is lacking and has never been seriously studied as a cause of poor student outcome. Are parents going to be participants in the process or merely consumers?
If the Left really wants to make government more effective, maybe they should simply start with exposing how it isn’t. Let’s just look at my own State of Washington as an example. How does a 1.5 mile connector trail in the city of Redmond cost the tax payers 10 times as much that 16 miles of a complete state highway paving project? How does the State auditor discover that taxpayers are spending 9 million dollars each year on cell phone contracts that no one is using? How come no one is fired? How come no state employee was fired over the electronic tolling fiasco that cost the state tens of millions in lost revenue from both the Highway 520 and Tacoma Narrows bridges? Why wasn’t anyone fired (or pulled out of retirement and thrown in jail) for neglecting the upkeep of the State Ferry system for twenty years?
And you people on the Right, some of us in the middle might just want to go along with you on cutting the fat in some state or federal programs. We might understand that we should think twice before gutting the military budget, or getting all freaked out about a Christmas tree in a city park, but do you think we’re really going to put up deadly electric border fences as Herman Cain suggests? Do you really think the majority of Americans want to go back to pre-1972 toxin levels in our air quality, rivers and streams? The environment was so crappy in those days that even a sitting Republican president (Nixon) signed the EPA into existence! While Ron Paul had a dead-on analysis of terrorism (it’s a tactic, not an enemy), his conclusion that we should summarily shut down five federal agencies to save money is so simplistically naïve’ that it defies logic (I could save money by not buying food). And while most Americans seem to indicate that they want to support our troops, it’s the Republicans in the house that continually seem to stall passage of bills that would provide respite to our fighting forces and their families. Yet, they seem to be the same people who are reluctant (if not permanently entrenched) in their opposition to cut even a single military program. Scrubbing only the F-35 would save the taxpayers nearly a trillion dollars!
One thing that gives the Left the edge in this battle of one-downsmanship is that they at least articulate a need for better education. For the Right, budget trumps everything. As a child I was taught that the only two things you take out a loan for was a house and an education. The Right tells the government that it should operate like a business or a family, well guess what, most small businesses fail, most family budgets are in ruins. Operating a government is nothing like operating a business or a family. But like a successful business, it takes creative, competent and motivated people to run it, but unlike a business, who only needs customers with cash, a government needs a competent, educated population to guide it. That requires education. Being employed today requires education. Investing and spending wisely requires education. Knowing how to discern between fact and fiction requires education.
The Left and Right may never see eye to eye, but both could try focusing their efforts on the one thing we have in common: the fact that we all live here together.
