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Friday, September 18, 2009

A Pennsylvania Budget...Maybe?

Article link here.

I'm going to say this right up front: ANYONE who believes that the budget failure in Harrisburg in the fault of "those Democrats" or "those Republicans" is, in my humble opinion, mentally retarded. Direct enough?

This whole budget fiasco isn't a failure of Democrats...or Republicans...it's a failure of a system of Harrisburg that exists more for the enrichment of career politicians than it does for anything else. When economic times are good, it's easy for the career politicians to hide their self-dealing, as the voting population is busy enjoying various forms of consumption. It's when times are tough, and the voters are actually looking to the state government to make things better (mistake #1 by the way) that they notice just how pathetically bad the situation is in Harrisburg.

Solutions? The current structure of the Pennsylvania Legislature will never create any meaningful reform. It truly is like asking a fox to guard a hen-house. I'm convinced that, knowing there will always be some forms of self-dealing and enrichment among all politicians (greed and graft aren't the exclusive properties of either political party), we need to reduce the amount of it by reducing the size of the legislature.

In the end, it's like dealing with a chronic health condition: you know you will never cure it, so you look for ways to live with it by minimizing the damage.

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