CSotD: Scrooge was a soft touch
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Stuart Carlson, on the new Bright Young Man of the moment.
I heard Louis Josephson, CEO of Riverbend Community Mental Health in Concord, on New Hampshire Public Radio's "The Exchange" Wednesday, on the topic of cuts to mental health treatment funding. They do have the show archived, but it isn't formatted to allow you to jump to a particular spot, and I know his comment was at least a half hour into the show, so I'll paraphrase, because I really liked the way he handled a simple-minded analogy that gets bandied about:
He noted that, if the budget really were like your family checkbook, and you saw that you didn't have enough money to pay for the things you needed, you'd go out and get a second job. You'd do whatever you needed to do to get the additional money it takes to afford the things your family needs.
A moment of "Duh."
It's a half-baked analogy to begin with. Anybody who has an outstanding balance on their mortgage or who has an automobile loan needs to shut up about "balancing the budget." But, if you're going to use the analogy, then follow it through: You cut some things, sure. You economize. But you also seek additional revenues, and that starts with raising taxes.
It is hard to believe that we're sitting here among the ruins of an economy pillaged and destroyed by the fanciful notion of a "free market" that readjusts itself and the even more transparently self-interested practice of letting the top 1% of the population control a hugely disproportionate share of the economy, and yet we still hear claims that asking them to pitch in would make things worse.
Other countries are managing to rebuild without throwing their poor, their old, their sick and their children to the wolves of free enterprise. Why do we throw up our hands and pretend to be unable to do the same?
Ebenezer Scrooge asked if there were no workhouses, no prisons:
"I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.'
`Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'
`If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, `they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
Of course, that is fiction. Today, we're doublebunking in the prisons and shutting down the workhouses, so that people like Scrooge won't, indeed, have to pay so much to support them.
I don't always agree with Kristof, but he's got this situation well-pegged.
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