Just Like A Trip To Disney World, County's Budget Is Goofy!

Rarely do I agree with the Herald Times’ editorials but hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. In the Tuesday, August 23, 2005 editorial labeled “County council’s funding priorities are questionable” the editorial staff has finally provided local citizens something worth reading. They outlined the high points or should I say the low points of the County Council’s budget process in which the Democrat majority made good on its promises to increase funding for all of the social service agencies that are on their pet list. Anyone with even a minimal amount of financial reasoning should have been able to recognize the dilemma the Council was faced with, a substantial increase in the cost of doing business with only a slight increase in overall funding.

The fiscally responsible and prudent thing to do would be to provide funding for only the most basic of necessities and then if anything was left over, which there wasn’t, divvy it up accordingly. What this Council did was just the opposite, they started with increases in several social services providers and then worked their way backwards by making cuts in other areas that include some of the most basic areas of local government, like fuel money. The Democrats on the Council think the average person doesn’t understand the budget process well enough to understand what they have done, hopefully most people are smarter than they give them credit for. What they have done is balance their irresponsible budget with cash reserves, money that was prudently put aside by former Auditor Barbara Clark. Money that is required to run our County government until the next dispersement from the State arrives. Money that once it’s gone it’s really gone.

This ideology is similar to the average family spending money they don’t have on some discretionary item like “they’re annual trek to Disney World”. Lets say as an example this family has in years past saved the money and was able to make the trip without going into debt. However this year because of expenses beyond their control they were not able to put aside any money. All the while knowing they don’t have the money to cover the expense they go ahead and put the entire trip on a credit card thinking they’ll pay it off with future income. However their income doesn’t go up, as a matter of fact their income doesn’t even keep up with inflation thus resulting in the family having to borrow money just to make ends meet. This is all just basic Economics 101, a lesson most of the members of this County Council obviously missed.

The lesson that we will all learn from their action is next year as expenses exceed budgets for basic items like fuel the Council will be confronted by department heads requesting “additional appropriations” and they will have no choice but to borrow money to fund them. They’ll pontificate on how they don’t have a choice because of increases that are beyond their control but remember they did have a choice and they choose to ignore the facts. Bottom line, with their irresponsible actions the Democrats on the Council have once again proven they really don’t care how high you taxes go. Sometimes government is just like Disney World, just plain Goofy!