Yet another instance of spending time writing somewhere else instead of writing here, so, am double purposing yet again. This thread from FB was from Sept (yeah, catching up as always) when Obama wanted to spend $25 Billion (more of what we don’t have) to rehab up to 35,000. Once again the question must be asked (yes, edited to be more bloggish):
Why is it the Federal Govt’s job to “rehab 35,000 schools”?
If the local communities have so bungled their OWN infrastructure so badly, why is it that the rest of us have responsibility to fund it just because Obama says so? Where’s the accountability in that?
And the last part of that is couched in those terms because education has generally been a local activity and not a federal one. Here in NH, it IS local – every year for the last six years, I have reviewed my town’s school budget as part of my hamlet’s Budget Committee (which actually prepares the budgets that all of the town’s voters vote up or down). As part of doing that, I have learned the hardware that tax monies get sucked out of the local scene, filter through the DC bureaucracy, get strings attached, and then a relatively small percentage comes back to the folks that forked it out in the first place. You can be sure that this “free money” as everyone else is kowtowing to get (under the rubric of blatant greed of “if we don’t take it, someone else will” – just like kindergarteners who are afraid they won’t get their Twinkie snack).
Well, it seemed to one commenter that the right answer was “Sure!”; after all “because nobody else wants to do it”? In other words, if the locals decide to do nothing, then his implicit answer is the Feds must do it by default. My retort was:
You think the Feds should because the locals won’t? Shouldn’t the Feds be smart enough not to fall for that Tom Sawyer fence whitewash trick?
Yes, I started to get a bit hot under the collar as I have with others – it seems with folks like the commenter, their expectation is that the Feds are supposed to right all ills – when the locals are judged to have not done the job, it has to be made right by spending other folks money. Wrong answer, as it penalizes those communities that ARE doing the right things.
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