Lemme make a list of posts to come...
1. My Wife is more or less healthy, but still has chronic illness.
2. My son has just finished his first basketball season in fifth grade.
3. I have begun to experiment with fermented beverages.
4. My mental health has not really improved, but has not degraded either.
But what shall we talk about now? Work. No way I can piss off anyone with that topic, right?
Lets talk funding. First off, some of my friends who may be reading this are very conservative, and I'm ok with that. However, please do not listen to people in other states who are trying to convince you that people who hold state jobs are overpaid. We are not. The examples they are giving you regarding wealthy state employees are hand picked to give you an altered perspective. Are there overpaid state employees? You bet. The highest paid people on campus where I work are not the high level administrators, but the sports team coaches. I don't have actual numbers in front of me, but there are some coaches in the State of Illinois who make over a million dollars per year. I don't care how good of a coach you are, you are not worth that much money. Let's also talk about how much money the politicians themselves are making. Again, no numbers, but when was the last time you saw a politician wearing ratty old jeans and a t-shirt as a press conference... Most of us in the service of the state are significantly under the salary levels of our contemporaries in the private sector. Don't buy the bullshit.
When I was a kid, the phrase I heard on a lot of lips was "You can't solve problems by throwing money at them". And this is true, Unless the problem is You Don't Have Enough Money!
Now, we can argue about wasteful spending, pork projects, and pointless grants to study nonsensical bullshit, but all that was gone years ago. We are now down to cutting entire programs, departments, and degree paths. Several years ago, the department my wife was working in was running low on basic office supplies. Pencils, pens, notepads, etc... The department chair was told that there was no money left in the budget, and the next year's budget was not going to be available for 3 months. This department chair went to an office supply store, and bought supplies out of her own pocket!
That was several years ago, and things have gotten worse. No I have no idea why our current state and federal leaders want us to not have the funding we need, but that is the only explication I have left. Now, I live in Illinois, so it is a massively difficult and verbose to explain accurately how we got into this mess, but I will say that every politician who has served in Illinois in the last 10 years bears some responsibility for this, including our current President.
It's pointless to argue about it, as while they all share responsibility, no one is more responsible than any other. You could point a finger at any of our past Governors who are currently serving time, but they are all responsible while also not being wholly responsible at the same time.
How do you fix a system that is built on massive systemic problems? How do you remove the influence of big money? How do you keep politicians honest? How do you balance the need for adequate spending with the desire for lower taxes?
Beats me, but I do know that we have tried all the old ideas that the Tea-publicans have brought to the table, and they didn't work for Reagan, Bush, Bush Jr. or any other outspoken conservative. And on the other side of the coin, we can't spend money we don't have. Do we need Health Care Reform. I think we do, but in order to pay for it, we need to give up something else. How about the massive no-bid contracts for military contractors? Perhaps we could make do with the Air Force, Navy, Armor, and troop technology we have for a while...Do we need new M1 Tanks, or could we refurbish the ones we have? Do we need 3 more Aircraft Carriers? Do we need to be the playground monitors of the middle east? Bring our boys home, and let them defend themselves.
On a final note...I did not write this to start an argument. Don't bother to email me and tell me how wrong I am, and how I'm a dumbass liberal who should be taken out and shot. Our world has changed a lot in the last decade, and mid century battle tactics and equipment won't do on a modern battlefield. Having more tanks, ships, planes, or guns would have done nothing to stop the terrorists in 2001, and the Western approach to war-fighting has left us in a massive quagmire in the Middle East.
I'll try to post again in a few weeks, but that all depends on what kind of free time I can scrape up.
