[Vision2020] The Clown and the Cop

[Art Deco]

[image: Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the
Web]<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/>
June 14, 2012, 9:00 pmThe Clown and the CopBy TIMOTHY
EGAN<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/timothy-egan/>

Timothy Egan <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/timothy-egan/>on
American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Tags:

Congress <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/congress/>, government
spending <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/government-spending/>,
public
servants <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/public-servants/>

Trapped with a Fox News big screen in my stable of fellow trotters at the
gym a few weeks ago, I took in the worldview that may give the White House
to Republicans this year. After burning 400 calories, I was ready to torch
the capital.

For almost half an hour I heard another rehash of how my tax dollars were
spent on a clown, a comic and a mind reader at a retreat for government
workers outside Las Vegas in 2010. Those tin-eared bureaucrats in the
General Services Administration spent a total of $835,000. An outrage, of
course, and it was typical, I was informed, of runaway government spending
under Barack Obama.

Not mentioned during my face time with Fox was a defense bill passed by the
House that same day authorizing $642 billion in spending next year — almost
$8 billion more than the Defense Department asked for. And this vote broke
a promise by the Tea Party-backed Congress, when they agreed last year to
cut defense spending over 10 years.

Question: Which is more important, a bunch of clowns spending on a clown,
for less than a million dollars, or a Congress that threw more than a
thousand times that amount at things that are considered unnecessary —
outdated bases, pie-in-the-sky contractor schemes — by the very people who
are supposed to spend it?

The clown, clearly. Why? Because most people are unaware that the
Republican majority, the same politicians who rode into office in 2010 on a
pledge of not spending beyond our means, voted to run up the deficit last
month on behalf of those parochial projects.

But nearly everyone knows about the clown, the comic and the mind reader.
And to be fair to Fox, which is more than it is on any given day, the
lamestream media has had plenty of stories about the Vegas debacle and very
little on the padding for the Pentagon.

Elections are about narrative; as such, money and partisan reporting are
vital to shape a story line that moves a majority of voters. A central
Republican message is that government spending is out of control under
Obama, and most of those outlays are wasteful. Do the facts have a chance?
Let’s give it a try.

First, you have to go back to Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, more than
50 years ago, to find a rate of federal spending growth lower than that of
the Obama administration. This counterintuitive conclusion was reported
last month by Rex Nutting in
MarketWatch<http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-05-22/commentary/31802270_1_spending-federal-budget-drunken-sailor>,
a Web site affiliated with The Wall Street Journal. It’s been labeled
“mostly true” by the nonpartisan referee Politifact, though others have
challenged the premise of the piece. Nutting took much of 2009 out of
Obama’s column because the spending was authorized in the last year of the
Bush presidency.

But even when he’s tagged with most of 2009’s outlays — including the
stimulus, which saved more than one million jobs — Obama is a relative
miser on the growth chart. Still, Mitt Romney continues to say that under
Obama, federal spending “has accelerated at a rate without precedent.” Of
course, Obama would like to spend more, and if given a free hand, may rise
to a level justifying Romney’s claim.

Which brings us to the second part of the argument, on the nature of
government spending. Certainly, there are perennial abuses that feed public
distrust. Not just the clown, but municipal workers who get outsize
benefits. It erodes support for helping the poor when the director of the
Los Angeles Housing Authority can get $260,000 a year in base salary.

But for every bureaucrat living in a McMansion while doling out vouchers
for people in leaky trailers, there are honest cops, hardworking teachers,
gutsy firefighters and tireless enforcers of laws that protect our air,
water and public lands.

In Romney’s view, these public servants are dishonorable, and maybe even
less American. “We have 145,000 more government workers under this
president,” Romney said in Colorado last month. “Let’s send them back home
and put you back to work.”

Again, this is simply not true. Under Obama, public sector employment has
fallen by more than 600,000 workers. Obama has tried to increase these
rolls — adding teachers, cops and firefighters under federal grants used
for the last 50 years — but has been stymied by a Congress that wants to
end his presidency by sabotaging the economy. And so long as people believe
government money is more likely to be spent on a clown instead of a cop,
the Congress can act without consequence.

There’s also the notion of “send them home,” as if these workers were some
kind of foreign element in our midst. They are home, in the uniforms of
their calling. Look around, and you’ll see them in harm’s way, rushing to
wildfires in the West, strapping on bullet-proof vests before going out in
100-degree heat, showing up at 6 a.m. to prepare the day’s lessons for your
kid.

Steve Jobs famously said in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech that
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
Similarly, presidential elections are too important to be guided by someone
else’s facts.
Ghostery has found the following on this page:WebTrends


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120615/b4547880/attachment.html>