Letters to the editor galore appear in my daily newspaper decrying any suggestion that the brilliants in Austin are even thinking about making a single cut to education. Now, I believe that education is among the most important items the state funds, and I understand the frustration of the critics who look at our rankings and wonder why we want to go lower.
But surely there's some fat in the education budget somewhere. At least the solons have the wisdom to say we need to end mandatory steroid testing for all high school athletes, a program that used millions of dollars to catch a handful of violators. Tell me we don't have more boondoggles like that in any government budget you want to name.
Then a Democrat up in Wash. D.C. suggests cutting funding for the Army to sponsor a racer in NASCAR. The sponsorship amounts to chump change in a trillion dollar budget, but the Ellyphonts decided that the sponsorship was inviolable. Never mind that other branches of the armed forces abandoned their sponsorships because of a lack of evidence that they worked as a recruiting tool. Apparently the pro-biz Republicans never heard of the idea of jettisoning a program that costs money but doesn't actually grow the business.
Instead, they want to cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This has sent the management of our local PBS and NPR stations to the airwaves to urge viewers and listeners to contact their congressmen. CPB is a favorite conservative whipping boy because public broadcasting is considered to be too liberal. Interestingly, the NPR outlet in Abilene is a part of the journalism department of ACU, where it functions as lab training for budding journalists. ACU can hardly be considered to be a hotbed of liberalism -- except among some parts of the Church of Christ. And for my money public broadcasting is much more useful than NASCAR sponsorships.
But therein lies the problem -- us. We go to Congress or the Lege and say, "This is a worthy program, and it won't fly unless the government helps fund it."
In the case of Texas, when we were flush with funds, the Lege said, "Sure, we can do that." Up in D.C. they didn't have the funds, but if the project resonated with the party in power, it was funded.
Now we don't have the money, but no one seems to want to give up their favorite program. This is valuable, we tell our representatives, you can't possibly cut this.
As the old song says, "Somethin' gotta give." I hope the twerps we've elected to represent us can figure out what really important, but it's only a faint hope at this point.
