Recently, bureaucrats over in Washington state — in the new spirit of giving that you see everywhere you look, these days — sent each of about a quarter-million welfare recipients a check for one dollar. This appears to be a ploy designed to squeeze another forty or so million dollars from the federal government by gaming, or outright manipulating (if you want to be honest), federal regulations. Solely to benefit the poor, benighted denizens of The Evergreen State, naturally, so no snickering over there in the back of the theater, okay? I mean, really…has everybody lost control of not only their own pocketbook but also that of the federal and more than a few state governments?
Nowadays, everywhere you look, the news is full of stories of budget deficits and impending state or city bankruptcies. I live south of bee-yoo-tee-full Detroit, Michigan, so all I hear all day is talk of this-or-that auto company going down for the count in a fatal Titanic-like death dive, and Detroit itself is becoming increasingly like some Third World cities I’ve been in. Except there aren’t any goats running around Motown’s streets, as yet. Or maybe there were, but they were captured and turned into goat burgers by a few of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s now-unemployed sycophants and loyalists from the old administration. They were replaced by new incompetents, uh…I mean new bureaucrats, whose mouths are watering in anticipation of getting their sweaty palms on some of the 3.2 billion dollars the city hopes to get from the newly-approved economic stimulus program.
By comparison, good old Washington state’s hustling of “only” forty million bucks from the feds seems to be nickle-and-dime poker stakes in the grand scheme of things. Yet, the worrisome thing in all this is the attitude put on display by the public servants of the state government charged with seeing to the honest use of the money which the taxpayer (me, you, Donald Trump…okay, forget him) gives to government in all its different forms. Saying that his state was only “…maximizing federal regulations to the benefit of Washington’s residents,” Leo Ribas (who heads Washington’s welfare agency) seemed genuinely sincere in his desire to get, on average, another thirty dollars a month per welfare recipient by sending them each that one-dollar check. The problem, though, is he doesn’t see anything wrong with spending probably well over a million dollars of the people’s money to get those checks sent. The whole thing (spending money in anticipation of getting more money back) sounds like what we do when we mortgage the house to buy a ton of lottery tickets in hopes of hitting the super-duper big jackpot that’ll make everything all better. It usually doesn’t work out well in the end, but we’re so focused on the here-and-now, we never grasp the long-term ramifications of what could happen if our plans come for naught.
Maybe the extra money from the federal government will come in, and maybe it’ll be used wisely and honestly. Who knows? Stranger things have certainly happened. Like Al Franken becoming a United States Senator, for example. And surely a nation willing to voluntarily go more than 13 TRILLION dollars in debt won’t care about a sum as measly as what Ribas and his fellow state employees hope to find under the cushions of the Barcalounger our country’s in danger of turning into. Still…is finding new ways to be wasteful and a spendthrift going to become the norm under the new “everybody DESERVES money” rules for being a good public employee? If so, I’m throwing away the resumes I sent to Donald Trump and making a Tom Joad-like sprint for the Pacific Northwest. No “Grapes of Wrath” migrant work for me, boys and girls. I’m only willing to sign up for work helping to spend all that fat cash. Totally to help others, mind you. After all, I’ll be a “public servant.”
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