Thursday, April 07, 2016

About That Change In Tone, Part 2

A while back, I justified a rant that had followed a peace, love and forgiveness post causing a wild change in tone on the blog. Here's a tidbit.
Detroit went bankrupt while I worked there. Elderly pensioners ended up with smaller pensions. Permanently. I wondered what it would be like to work in their Catholic Charities food resource center. They must have been utterly overwhelmed. They probably still are.

The Detroit bankruptcy was deliberate. Bankruptcy is simple mathematics and everyone involved in the budgeting process could see it coming a mile away. There was time to make changes and they chose not to do so. It was an act of intentional cruelty by people who had the personal resources to avoid the consequences of their decisions.
Here we go again, this time in Connecticut. A thoroughly progressive state following Bernie Sanders / Hillary Clinton / Robert Reich prescriptions is going bankrupt with predictable results.
(M)ost of these unilateral cuts traditionally fall on social services, public colleges and universities, and some primary and secondary education programs.

That was the case again on Wednesday.

The Department on Developmental Disabilities lost $17.2 million, while $19.5 million in further cuts were imposed on five other agencies that provide social services.

Some specific program reductions within those agencies include:
  • $9.7 million for community residential services for people with developmental disabilities and $4.6 million for employment and day services for people with developmental disabilities.
  • $1.9 million in grants for mental health and substance abuse treatment providers.
  • $829,415 from general assistance managed care, which covers behavioral health services for state residents. The Malloy administration excluded this account from across-the-board cuts in its proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year.
  • $234,949 from school-based health clinics, which provide primary care, mental health and dental services to students.
The coming Connecticut bankruptcy is deliberate. The politicians bought votes with unsustainable spending and got themselves 6-figure jobs. I have no doubt that anyone who expressed a pro-business, anti-tax, low-spending sentiment was excoriated as greedy and selfish.

I'm sure that Catholic Charities across Connecticut will be looking for volunteers if you're at loose ends a couple days a week.

2 comments:

IlĂ­on said...

When Caesar does "charity", the end result will *always* be the looting of the public purse by the politically-connected, then increased taxes to paper-over the looting, then more looting, then increased taxes ... repeat, as necessary, until Caesar kills the polity.

Foxfier said...

"A man has not got a right to "nurse" a constituency with aggressive charities, to buy it with great presents of parks and libraries, to open vague vistas of future benevolence; all this, which goes on unrebuked, is bribery and nothing else. But a man has got the right to go to another free man and ask him with civility whether he will vote for him. The information can be asked, granted, or refused without any loss of dignity on either side, which is more than can be said of a park."
― from "All Things Considered"