From Joe‘s link:
Or here’s an analogy: Your family’s bank account runs dry before the end of the month, so you have to subsist on beans for a week. When the next paycheck comes in, certainly you want to reduce spending so that your money doesn’t again run out. But you don’t want to keep eating nothing but beans. It’s important that your diet be balanced.
What’s important for the state is that public schools, colleges and universities not be kept on punishingly short rations. It’s important that programs serving the mentally ill and disabled not be gutted. It’s important that the state continue to offer its employees fair pay and benefits.
First off, the state is like a poor family analogy is inherently flawed. Now granted, there are no perfect analogies, but this flaw hard to get past. The poor family cannot legally use violence and the threat of violence to take money from other poor families, so that is why it must subsist on beans when the money runs out.
Now, give this family the same ability to use violence legally to fill their coffers, and they would greet any monetary problems in the same way Gov. Perdue and our state leaders have: not even be able to imagine doing anything else other than taking money legally from other poor families.
To put it in Gov. Perdue’s words, “This is the only pathway I know.” Come to think of it, I bet they’d even justify it as “for the children.”
Now as for the balanced diet analogy, it would be a helluva lot easier for the state to maintain a “balanced diet” during a recession if during the good times ? speaking of beans and poor families ? state leaders didn’t sell off our cows to every Magic Beans con artist who lobbies them.
The John Locke Foundation has argued for years for a healthy budget diet for the state, but heavens, how our politicians love to chug!
