Why State Budgets Matter

Following up on California’s status as an economic disaster-hole, it begs the question of “why do state budgets matter?” Frankly, the long and short of it is if your state is broke, then by law they’re required to not be broke. The result is higher taxes and cuts. Because most governments are incapable of thinking rationally, they usually start cutting education, police, healthcare, etc. You know, the things people use and actually hired the government to deal with.

When they raise taxes, that lowers demand for services as people have less money, businesses have less funds for payroll and supplies and they cut wages and staff and, voila, you have a deeper recession. Not to mention that states cut contracts with outside vendors, thereby deepening matters more.

Again, I’m going to re-iterate that this governing things isn’t necessarily hard. Mitch Daniels saved money by buying floor mats for heaven’s sake:

[Daniels ended] bottled water for employees of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (annual savings, $35,000). Ending notification of drivers that their licenses are expiring; letting them be responsible for noticing (saving $200,000). Buying rather than renting floor mats for BMV offices (saving $267,000 this year). Initiating the sale of 2,096 surplus state vehicles (so far, $1.95 million in revenue from 1,514 sales). Changing the state lottery’s newsletter from semimonthly and in color to a monthly and black-and-white (annual savings, $21,670).

Note, this was in 2005 after 1 year in office. I’d also mention that I’d go as far as to eliminate newsletters, period. Who reads newsletters!? Get a website!

And, the BMV now reminds people about expiration notices electronically, for practically nothing, via email for Hoosiers enrolled in MyBMV.

States have money to burn and money that can be saved and refunded to taxpayers. They just need to step up and deal with it. Don’t tell me the Feds don’t have a few newsletters that can be chucked.

California Now Officially Worse than a Developing Country

Just in from the West Coast:

California’s debt is seen by investors as riskier than Kazakhstan’s, according to Bloomberg News. Five-year credit default swaps tied to California’s debt, which are a key measure of the market’s belief in the likelihood of default, are actually trading at 100 basis points above those of Kazakhstan. In other words, the market believes a developing country of just 15.7 million people is actually less likely to default on its debt than California, which makes up the eighth-largest economy in the world.

…

And last week, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, the nation’s second largest bank, warned that California’s $20 billion budget gap could pose a bigger risk than the Greek debt crisis.

In other news, here in the Midwest, where rational people live:

During the fat years of the mid-2000s, while most governors went on spending sprees, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was trimming Indiana’s payroll, slowing the state government’s growth, and turning a $800 million deficit into a consistent surplus. Now that times are hard, his fiscal rigor is paying off: the state’s projected budget shortfall for 2011, as a percentage of the budget, is the third-lowest in the country.

Why Does America Have These Discussions?

I’m just blown away this evening. First, this guy:

A 72-year old man spent so much time on hold with a state unemployment agency trying to claim his benefits that he racked up a $700 cell phone bill, reports Jeremy Joyola of Eyewitness News 4 in Albuquerque.

OK, first of all we’re not getting the whole story because he probably called a thousand times listening to the recording over and over and over again at 12 noon on a Monday. I know people that do that because they’re evidently incapable of following directions or are afraid to “press 1 for English”. Plus, who makes a phone call on a cell phone and says, “Well, I guess I’d better keep using this.” Do we not know what a “minute” plan equates to?

Next up, this gem:

[A]s many as one and a half million people living in rural areas might not be able to get broadcast television channels as part of their satellite television service because the impasse has blocked the extension of the law allowing satellite companies to carry those signals.

Solution: read a frackin’ book. Then you’ll learn that you shouldn’t stick with a satellite TV carrier that is, evidently, incapable of giving you local service so you can know when the weatherman is wrong. That, or don’t expect to get much of any service when you live in the middle of the inside of a mountain.

When I lived in Salem we never expected cable TV, water and sewage lines or hell, phone service that worked – cellular or wired. Why? Because we lived in the middle of nowhere. If you want to be somebody with something, go live somewhere. That’s what I did and now I get to blog more.

I Am Totally Pro-Death

Even when Obama’s shooting guys in the face, Republicans STILL find flaws:

At a panel on national security policy at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, a prominent lawyer from the Bush administration’s Department of Justice said he was concerned that the higher number of terrorist executions taking place under Obama was compromising U.S. intelligence operations.

“Why have executions increased?” asked Viet Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and one of the authors of the USA Patriot Act. Dinh complained that “the president and vice president expound this fact as a fact that they are actually successful in war.”

I’m just going to come on out and say I’m totally pro-death. I’m all for guns, abortions, executions and basically anything that gets people out of my way.

Frankly, in this world of stupid people doing extraordinarily stupid things, some people just should be shot on-site so we don’t have to pay for their trials where they’ll no doubt continue to say stupid things. There ability to say and do stupid things are probably interrelated.

For example, if you break into someone’s house, the property owner has a right to shoot you because A) you’re stupid to think you can just get away and B) no one wants your grubby hands on their stuff.

If it were me, I’d shoot you in the head because I don’t want you limping away from the scene of the crime and wasting my time in court just so you can end up in jail and cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

My logic goes for car accidents, too. If I ever face a car or plane crash, we’re going to hit something hard because I don’t wanna limp away from that wreck with a bunch of medical bills and insurance costs.

IU Saves Money & the Peasants Rejoice

Cool!

Indiana University officials confirmed today that the university has eliminated 100 jobs through a hiring slow-down in order to cut $59 million out of its budget – cuts that were ordered by Gov. Mitch Daniels earlier this year.

Also today, the IU Board of Trustees approved three new construction projects totaling about $71 million – $44 million for a new studio building for the Jacobs School of Music at the Bloomington campus; $25 million for the first phase of a new science and engineering building at IUPUI in Indianapolis; and $2 million for a new roof on Assembly Hall in Bloomington.

No one got laid off, the campuses keep up with new facilities and life goes on with no negative impact on students. It didn’t even expend tax dollars out the wazoo.

See. Not hard at all, is it?

Can I C Ur Boobz?

The Indiana Legislature is taking a punt on sexting:

Proposed legislation making some teens’ practice of sending racy photos by cell phone a juvenile offense in Indiana appears headed for a summer legislative study committee to iron out policy problems.

Maybe some of my older readers can answer this question for me: what did 14 year olds do before sexting? I have a feeling it was actually being in the same room. Frankly, sexting is probably a good thing for parents. Let little Jimmy see Susie on his cell phone in his bedroom instead of actually being in the same room as Susie and going much further. To criminalize sexting dilutes the sex offender registry and just wastes time. I’ve checked the registry in my part of town and it’s mostly really old creepy guys or, more likely, a bunch of 18, 19 and 20 year olds who no doubt got caught with a slightly younger girl who was, for legal purposes, a juvenile.

Back to sexting, though. When I was in school, everyone used webcams to flaunt their naughty bits. I imagine before that everyone sent photos in emails and I suspect before that we all had phone sex. I bet as you go further back, people were probably etching themselves doing kinky stuff on cave walls.

Deal with it people.

People Re-Write IUPUI’s History

The Star has a story today about IUPUI’s history around its founding. They’re really only two trains of thought on it: either IUPUI pushed a bunch of black people out of the way for no good reason to sit up shop for the white man, or, IUPUI pushed a crappy part of the middle of town out of the way to make way for an integral piece of Indianapolis’ future. In which case, a bunch of black people got pushed out of the way:

Beginning in the mid-1950s and lasting well into the 1970s, hundreds of [African American] families were uprooted and relocated — their homes either purchased outright or condemned by the city and then purchased. This was done not just for the new university but as part of a larger redevelopment of an area that many considered a classic example of urban blight.

Local human rights activists at the time, including a Jewish rabbi and a Protestant minister, pleaded with city officials to stop the process because fearful residents were being bullied into selling. Some in the black community began to refer to the effort as a “black removal” plan.

“IUPUI, the city . . . they became the Ku Klux Klan,” said an angry John Lands, an area resident who once ran the neighborhood YMCA before it was demolished. “They took the black folks’ land. I think it’s a shame.”

The article is a little lengthy, but this part stuck out at me:

Kenneth B. Durgans, the assistant chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at IUPUI, said that although he is sensitive to history, he hopes people also take into account the good things the college has done for the city’s minority population.

Why am I paying for an Assistant Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? Please tell me she’s an assistant to the university chancellor and that there isn’t also a head chancellor just for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Today Was a Bad Day in America

It’s not been a very good day in America. First, we have this guy:

A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service launched a suicide attack on the agency Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, setting off a raging fire that sent workers fleeing for their lives.

At least one person in the building was missing.

A federal law official identified the pilot as Joseph Stack and said investigators were looking at a long anti-government screed and farewell note that he apparently posted on the Web earlier in the day as an explanation for what he was about to do.

In it, the author cited run-ins with the IRS and ranted about the tax agency, government bailouts and corporate America’s “thugs and plunderers.”

“I have had all I can stand,” he wrote in the note, dated Thursday, adding: “I choose not to keep looking over my shoulder at `big brother’ while he strips my carcass.”

So, we have an anti-state guy, fighting for what he thought was a just cause to wake up the American “zombies” and get the attention where it belongs. Speaking of anti-state, I wonder how he’d feel about this sort of crap:

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

Tonight’s winning lottery numbers are 1, 9, 8 and 4.

New Rule: Politicians Must Know Word and Excel

I’m in this weird spot in my life where I’m a young, urban feller but I’m also operating a business. On one hand, tax cuts (my 40% tax rate is a little sickening) sound really, really nice. And, on the other hand, not being a racist homophobe seems like a good plan for future success, too.

So, when Evan Bayh decided to step down, I thought it was a good thing – time to get some young new guy in there. Then, I saw a picture of Dan Coats in the Star who they’re calling the new front-runner for his seat. Then I realized he was old and that pissed me off.

I’ve never known a world without a Bayh, Bush, Clinton or Kennedy in power at the national level. Now, without a Bayh, Bush or Kennedy in place after this term cycle and a Clinton in no real legislative authority, I thought we were moving on. And then, our state graciously donates an old guy who used to be in the Senate two decades ago as the “front runner” to fill the seat of a guy I never really liked anyway.

Damnit. This is not hard. Part of me wants to barge into the state HQ of both parties and yell, “WHAT THE HELL!? IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO!?”

Therefore, it’s time for a new rule: people that want to run for positions of power and authority over my country and state have to at least know Word and Excel.

Courts Just Learned That People Can’t Live off Free

I got a jury summons to be on standby in mid-December. The entire week was nothing but, “I’ll schedule you for X, but I may have to move you to Z because of jury duty”, and “I’d like to, but I don’t know what I’ll be doing in 12 hours.” It’s a horrid turd called the “jury system”. I never got called, but it destroyed my whole week. It’s awful, woefully out-of-date and out-of-touch and I assume most courts everywhere are almost embarrassed by the lack of funds.

To add to the insult of being jerked around for a week, courts only pay a pittance for your appearance. Assuming you get called to serve on a jury and are selected, Marion County courts only pay about $40 a day. To cover the cost of parking ($12 a day) and lunch ($10), you can only expect to get a profit of $18 a day. People who make minimum wage net about $45 a day. You can imagine the concern for people who make, you know, anything above minimum wage.

Spare me the “it’s an honor” line – if it’s an honor, you should honor those serving with enough money to sustain themselves and their families based on a percentage of their daily gross income. At least when stupid crimes are involved for stupid people.

Evidently, the people of L.A. have had enough:

Spurned in his effort to get out of jury duty, salesman Tony Prados turned his attention to the case that could cost him three weeks’ pay: A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy was suing his former sergeant, alleging severe emotional distress inflicted by lewd and false innuendo that he was gay.

Prados, an ex-Marine, leaned forward in the jury box and asked in a let-me-get-this-straight tone of voice: “He’s brave enough to go out and get shot at by anyone but he couldn’t handle this?” he said of the locker-room taunting.

…

In this time of double-digit unemployment and shrinking benefits for those who do have jobs, courts are finding it more difficult to seat juries for trials running more than a day or two. And in extreme cases, reluctance has escalated into rebellion, experts say.

After three days of mounting insurrection, lawyers for both the deputy and the sergeant waived their right to a jury trial and left the verdict up to [the Judge].

“We can’t have a disgruntled jury,” said attorney Gregory W. Smith, who represents Deputy Robert Lyznick in the lawsuit against his former supervisor. He called the panel “scary” and too volatile for either side to trust.

It was already ridiculous to think that anyone could afford to sit on a jury before the recession, let-alone now.