One percent solution

I may have finally figured out how to send a mass emailing so that I can get TSJ fired up again. When I got my new computer the Outlook program wouldn’t let me send to the old list and, long story short, I tried a bunch of shit and it didn’t work so my genius fren Jenn figured out how to do it through Gmail, and Bob’s your uncle.

I have worked around government for a lot of my life off and on. The army, Lib of Cong, small town administrator, reporter covering all the local crap, selectmen, school, county stuff, local boards and cetera. I have also been an ersatz small business type where you learn to spend carefully and husband your resources or you’ll go out of business even faster than I did.

Why then is our jag-off government so over spent? And why is their solution to financial responsibility to almost always cut big bird? Connie Mack, R-Flah, says all we have to do is cut 1 percent from the budget to get back on track. Say he’s right. Every office anywhere can cut that much. Recycle printing paper. Don’t order shit you don’t need. Turn lights off. Trim back on mileage allowance. Keep heat and A/C a little lower. And at budget time, sharpen the pencil. In government they round off to the nearest five or ten percent. In the tiniest towns they don’t pull out records to see what they spent on office supplies last year before putting down a number. The selectman, and this is verbatim, sort of look at each other and say, “Whaddya think? 5 percent? Ten”? The other two doofus’s just say “sure” so they can get a little raise for their project. And the reason they are so laisse faire with your money is because they, every last one of the thieving bastids, are “under paid”. Everyone in government is under paid, according to themselves.

I substitute “taught’ at the high school. They had a course called JAG. I asked several people there what it stood for when I got my assignment but they didn’t know and a couple of them never heard of it. Jobs After Graduation one of my four students told me. The teacher who left me notes said that I should help them fill out job application forms from two of the local ski areas. I only had NINETY freakin’ minutes to get this down their resentful little throats. They had been "studying" this for the whole semester. They were in there because it was a gut course for which they could get full credit. A full time teacher (who couldn’t be there because like so many teachers at the end of the year, he had to use up his “personal time” or lose it) is required for this bullshit course. He probably makes less than $40k but his bennies are close to half that. Really? Our kids need this course that bad?

So his salary with bennies is almost a half of a percent of the $13, 000,000 school budget. I can’t help but thinking there are some other ways to save but I’m not going to waste my fingerprints making suggestions because we all know that nobody is ever even going to bend over to pick up a paper clip when they’ve got a squad of unionized janitors to clean up after them.

John Boehner’s salary jumped to a quarter of a million dollars when he became speaker. You should see his office. His staff has their own offices. Of course he has a car and driver, free haircuts, gym, mess hall, and the ubiquitous franking privileges also know as free campaign funding.

It isn’t just frustratingly crazy. It’s damned expensive and it is my firm belief that it will never ever change. Too bad.