When Politicians and Governments Cut Costs, The First Thing to Go is Common Sense!

It's official. Politicians just don't have common sense. They also do things in the most public, most stressful way, just to get attention. Watching the news report just gave several examples of their narrow-mindedness.

There are budget problems in every city and state. Cutting out all of the air traffic controllers in small airports, rather than some of them at different size airports just seems spiteful. (It's probably cheaper to hire the contractors than the federal employees that have such expensive benefit packages.)

Closing schools in cities (such as Chicago, Detroit, etc) is not the solution to budget problems. There are bound to be plenty of ways to cut costs - cut out the top heavy administrators, cut out the unneeded programs. As much as I hate to say it, cut out on buying materials such as new textbooks.  Chicago is closing schools in order to save money, a move that affects 30,000 students.  While it might be necessary to do this, I'd want to take a look at the budget first. The money "saved" from closing a school increases the cost to transport these students elsewhere. From my experience in school systems, EVERY district I've seen has highly paid consultants and various administrators. They spend their time creating paperwork, writing more guidelines, and over-supervising. Most of them could be removed, and allow teachers to actually spend time teaching, not documenting strategies used, and not only would they save money, they'd educate more students!

There are thousands of odd research projects paid for by government grants. Some of them are the ones that go to great lengths to prove something everyone already knew. Others are special projects that make absolutely no impact on anything, but it did provide a paycheck for a friend of the person that donated to the politicians re-election campaign.   In state government, and actually, in federal as well, there are a lot of trips to conventions and for meetings to talk with other people in similar jobs. If they want to communicate, they can send emails, or even video conference. Of course then they can't stay in expensive hotels on the beach, but such is life.

When families cut back, they cut out the extras, not the things that impact them the most. There are a LOT of ways to save money that aren't as painful. Somehow, I think the politicians would rather cause pain, just so they can blame the other guy for it!