(This is the second Blog on the theme, Elections Matter, the first one having been posted on September 25 entitled “Not All Politicians Are Alike.”)
You’ve heard it said, “Budgets are moral documents.” The reason they are is because they reflect priorities. They reveal what a person or a government values.
Our nation’s budget, then, is a moral statement, which is why what is currently going on at the federal and state levels of government is a moral disgrace.
Indiscriminate budget cutting, or, more graphically, taking an ax to the budget, is the name of the game being played. The Budget Sequester has been the most hideous form of this mindless approach to the budget, but irresponsible cutting has been and will continue to happen across the board because of political polarities.
This is a very dangerous situation in our nation, and nothing underscores this point more than the Ebola threat we are facing.
According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, one of the victims of indiscriminate budget cuts has been the hospital preparedness program that is funded out of the federal Health and Human Services Department. Over the last few years this program has been cut by over $500 million, or around a 35% reduction from previous funding levels.
These cuts have had the domino effect of our nation losing 40,000 public health employees across the nation. In addition, hospitals don’t have the money to practice emergency protocols for threats like Ebola. Dr. Redlener says such practice might have avoided the mistakes made when the Ebola patient in Texas first went to the hospital.
These are examples of the very serious consequences indiscriminate, careless cuts to the federal budget have (and, as a by-product, state budgets as well).
“But we can’t keep spending money we don’t have.” people say. Of course we can because “pay as you go” is an impossible way to run a government, a business, or a home.
“Yea,” someone retorts, “and that is why we are in a deficit crisis.”
That’s what we were hearing two years ago. But NOT anymore. No one is talking about the federal deficit, for good reason. It’s been cut almost in half.
You know how? By doing what responsible economists said at the time needed to be done. The Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire and the focus was put on job creation that has increased tax revenues.
And the sky didn’t fall!
But budget hawks still won’t listen to reason so they continue to cry, “Cut, Cut, Cut.”
There’s a old adage, “A penny wise and a dollar foolish.” That pretty much sums up where the budget hawks have gotten us as a nation.
So beware! The next time you hear a politician say, “Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem, Washington has a spending problem,” he or she will be telling you the truth, only it won’t be the kind of truth they want you to believe.
The spending problem we have is making budget decisions based on ideology rather than good sense.
If this continues, we may one day discover that we have gotten some things we didn’t pay for, one of which will be a disease control system that cannot stop a medical pandemic.
