After 2 years of shrinking tax coffers and watching all levels of governmental bodies forced to slash programs and cut jobs, I am forced to contemplate the process by which our local, state and national legislative bodies establish and set their budgets for the “coming” year.
What I question is: how can you establish a budget and allocate resources when you don’t know exactly how much money you have to work with? To me, this is the same fiscal attitude which gets so many young adults into financial troubles early in their life-they spend money they don’t yet have by using “credit” cards with the thought in mind that they will repay the money back later. But then, they lose their job or their hours get cut and now that lavish lifestyle they have been subsidizing on borrowed money, which they “expected” to have, they can no longer support.
How did we allow our legislative bodies become so backward thinking about our money? Can’t they learn to manage their-sorry our-the way every middle class family in America does-by planning for what they want and need with the money they know they will have. This is not how our local, state, and federal officials run their budgets; no, what they do is they speculate. And we, as a society, learned about what speculating got us over the last 5 years didn’t we? Unrealistic prices which free market Capitalism cannot support.
How this relates to our various levels of government is this: by speculating on what they think they will have to spend in the coming year they allocate funds for projects and programs that actually do not exist. Not only is this a pathetically poor budgeting process, but it also creates a government that is in constant flux across all its departments, lacking no long term fiscal or managerial stability.
With this sort of budgeting ideology in practice nationwide, it’s a wonder that more cities and states aren’t in the same situation as
No comments:
Post a Comment