CSotD: Millions for de fence
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I feel bad for my landlords, who were told by their insurance company that it wouldn't cover the house unless they upgraded its ancient wiring. (They're in the main section, I have the apartment at the back.)
Obviously, I feel better about the new wiring, because I've made a few trips to the basement to reset circuit breakers that shouldn't have minded the load they were being asked to carry. It had to be done and I'm glad the insurance company figured that out.
Sometimes, an ultimatum is what it takes, because otherwise the money involved makes it easy to say, "Maybe later."
But here's the reason I like living here: They had already decided this was the summer the house got repainted, and they didn't call that off, despite the cost of the rewiring.
The paint job may not have been a crisis, but, in the long term, it made sense to bite the bullet: The house would have taken some real moisture damage from going another year without it, and the painters also told me they did a lot of caulking around windows and so forth that should make next winter warmer inside.
Which brings us to Matt Davies' cartoon, about the complete lack of prioritization and budget sense at work in the federal government.
Granted, it could be worse: Think of how much we'd have to spend on fencing if the people on the other side of our long, northern border weren't, for the most part, white.
The bottom line is, it makes you think that whoever is doing the prioritizing must have the Willie Horton ad on a continuous loop in their office, because our tax dollars are being spent, not on actual needs or long-term benefits, but on perceived threats drummed up by bigots, ignoramuses and bigotted ignoramuses.
As a result, we can afford to hire border guards to keep brown people from coming up here and taking lousy no-benefit sweatshop jobs, but we can't afford to keep a sufficient number of teachers employed.
We can build a fence to keep out those yardworkers and motel cleaners, but we can't afford to repair our highways and bridges.
And we don't need to build schools. That's a waste of money, when we can simply break the unions, juggle the numbers and then let the parents who give a damn put their kids in the charter-school lifeboats and let us ignore the sinking, overcrowded ocean liners.
It's not all Willie Horton-driven, however. Some of it is based on sound economic dishonesty.
When we did spend money to bolster the economy and repair our infrastructure, the right wing complained that government spending doesn't create jobs.
Because apparently the people who replaced the narrow, aging bridge on the Interstate near my place were about to volunteer to do it for free, and the people who make concrete, asphalt, rebar, signs, vests, shovels, rakes, hard-hats and workshoes were all going to donate the materials.
And when those workers on the road and in the factories and quarries were promised paid jobs, they were required to promise not to spend the money on groceries, clothing or anything else.
That would be in violation of the lunatic fringe theory that, while government spending might accidentally create "jobs," it can't create "wealth."
No matter how much money may be spent there, grocery stores and malls do not return profits or generate sales tax or property taxes, nor do their owners and employees pay income tax.
Except when they pay too much tax, which is all the time, which doesn't count.
And, certainly, companies looking to expand don't base their decisions on whether they have good roads to ship their goods to market, or safe and efficient airports, or adequate police and fire protection in their communities or a competent, educated workforce.
We'll build jails, of course. Got to. Willie Horton, you know.
And we need to make advanced, expensive but outmoded weapons that the military doesn't want, just in case we're called upon to fight a war in the mid-20th century rather than the new-fangled kind.
But remember that building airplanes and aircraft carriers doesn't involve jobs or create wealth. For instance, McDonnell-Douglas-Boeing is run by a monastic order.
War is good business: Invest your son (and daughter, now!)
Though, to give credit where credit is due, looking at what we pay our soldiers and how we support our veterans, I'll give Congress props for some excellent cost-containment on those pesky meat-puppet line items.
And that's what it really comes down to: Whether you're talking about the federal budget or your own budget as a homeowner, it's all a matter of sensible spending:
If you don't waste money rewiring, you achieve additional savings by not spending money on insurance premiums.
At which point it's just plain foolish to pay for painting a house that's going to burn down anyway.
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