We got this thingy in the mail yesterday about how Connect NC Bonds would help build National Guard armories.

  1. Has anybody prepared a timeline or roadmap of what the bonds are supposed to finance? A group claims they were first supposed to pay for roads. Then, they were all about schools. I’m not sure when the National Guard came into play.
  2. The shortage of funding for the National Guard reminds me of the time city council raised the rent on the Army Reserve to pay for artistic lamp post bases. This was a grand episode in Asheville history, a cause valiantly championed by Bill Fishburne, but turned to allegations of mayoral death threats. What I’m saying is, maybe there are frivolities in the state’s budget that are less worthy than families’ ambitions to stay off welfare. (If you allow me to explain my gibberish, I come from a school of thought that alleges: (1) when government goes into debt, it does so by saddling itself with interest that must be paid back at a future date; and (2) the funds to pay down the interest will not be generated by intentional visioning, positive energy, or multicolored bar charts.)