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State Leaders Must be Out of Their Collective (and Collectivist) Mind
The state legislators who voted in a budget that takes 13.2 percent more of your money ($7.4 billion, up from $6.5 billion) than it did last year, provides ample proof of Ludwig von Mises Institute scholar Steven Yates' conviction that "reasoning abilities and the ability to evaluate information are astoundingly low" in our society.
But then, what else could you expect from a state that puts up signs by back country cattle guards warning bicyclists to "cross with caution?"
This new budget gives us all day kindergarten, pay raises to state workers, $40 million more to colleges and universities and a long list of other goodies Governor Napolitano's toadies delivered to her, courtesy of bipartisan vampires opting to suck more blood out of the middle class private sector that supports them.
Folks, this is la-la land. Don't these nitwits have any idea what's going on in this country? Or have career politicians truly lost the "ability to evaluate information?" Our state leaders seem to reflect dangerous symptoms of dyslexic thinking: i.e., too many people are struggling in Arizona, so we must give them more funding. It doesn't seem to occur to them that so many people are struggling because the constantly growing burden of government is already overwhelming. On the one hand governments continue to pass laws that make it harder for working people and small businesses to earn a living and on the other hand they demand more of your money to hand out to the victims of their policies.
I don't know a single private sector person who isn't struggling to grapple with rising taxes and other government costs, plus soaring gas, insurance, utility, housing, medical, food and college bills. Of course public employees are afflicted with the same problems. That's why the Governor wanted them to have a raise.
But even politicians should know that all government jobs, entitlements, and other expenses of government are merely consumption of that which must first be produced in the private sector.
So..., in an ideal world, responsible elected officials, endowed with "reasoning abilities and the ability to evaluate information," would take a good look at what's happening in the private sector and make a concerted effort to REDUCE the state budget by at least 13 percent rather than the opposite'then get busy rebuilding a work and entrepreneurial environment wherein a government job or entitlement is the gravy in a household income, rather than the meat and potatoes that it now is for an alarmingly increasing number of families' particularly in rural areas that used to produce the basics of life.
U.S. News & World Report says that 100 million Americans work fulltime and 21.5 million of those jobs are in some level of government. 50 million people collect checks each month from the Social Security Administration. That's a lot of consumption... and that's not even counting the thousands of other ways governments hit your pocketbook.
Budgets are comprised of numbers. Here are some numbers: A May 18 report from Reuters news service alerted us that the number of out-sourced white-collar jobs (business services, software, engineering, etc.) are expected to total 588,000 in 2004, double the 234,000 job loss predicted last year by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. This year (understandably to little fanfare), Chao announced her "Skills to Build America's Future" initiative... a new effort to promote trade schools. We must train more skilled carpenters, mechanics, electricians, cement masons, tile workers, bricklayers, truck drivers, etc.
In other words, writes columnist Ilana Mercer in the May 11-24 Insight, "young Americans had better learn to live by their hands lest their livelihoods be out-sourced." In the din over the 300,000 new jobs created recently, Mercer notes that the "government-fed news filters failed to mention which job sectors were surging (waitresses, building trades, waste services, retail, healthcare and social assistance, etc.)."
Also, nothing I read mentioned the number of jobs that had been LOST during the same period. Apparently the job creation was not NET job creation. An Associated Press article announced the biggest trade deficit ever, but also announced record U.S. exports. What is lacking in many of these reports is context. Wheat, soy and corn were our biggest exports, courtesy of U.S. agribusiness flooding poor agrarian nations with cheap basic foods, to the detriment of regional agriculture. In the 5/5/2004 Pioneer Newspaper, I reported that we lost our edge in advanced technology products and services to China and India in 2003 (another news item that was vastly underreported). Our export profile is exactly the opposite of that predicted by academics ten years ago. They said we would/should rule the world in high-tech and Third-World countries could take care of the low-class peasant work.
Instead, the Third-World is here, working in multinational factory fields, pig farms, turkey farms and beef farms' and China and India are taking over the world in high-tech work.
We are losing jobs rapidly in the export and import-competitive sectors of the economy. Unless we change the phony free-trade policies of the two Bushes and Clinton that put us in this position, we are going to have to ask ourselves the question... what are we sending our kids to college for, when our job opportunities for college graduates are decreasing rather than increasing?
Craig Paul Roberts is one of the few major media commentators (also a scholar with the Institute for Political Economy and a former assistant secretary of the Treasury) who has carefully tracked the raging river of college degree-required jobs flowing to India and China. In the May 24 American Free Press, Roberts carefully "evaluated the information available," and concluded, "why then, will Americans attend universities? Will Wal-Mart require an MBA to stock its shelves? Will nursing homes want their patients bathed by engineers?"
When all Roberts' evaluation was said and done, the bottom line was that despite our job creation in retail, construction, services, etc. THERE WERE ALMOST TWO AND A HALF MILLION FEWER PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS at the end of April, 2004 than existed in January, 2001. The "new economy," he said, is being outsourced even faster than the old manufacturing economy.
Roberts says the U.S. is a "Third World nation in the making." Our trade deficit pours $500 billion annually into foreign hands and our economy is unable to create export-competitive jobs. For our state leaders and academics to perpetuate the myth that throwing more money at universities without changing the way we conduct business with the world, and bash Arizona's floundering private sector small business and working class citizens with a billion-dollar budget increase under present economic conditions, verges on the criminal.
But they have managed to sell it on the basis that "we need all this stuff so our state can compete." It's a good racket if you can get away with it. And until more people learn to use their reasoning abilities and evaluate information, governments WILL get away with it.
As long as they can squeeze one more drop out of the private sector.
Payson.cc © 2004 Carrol Cox
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