Who'll stop the rain.....

Who’ll stop the rain.....
not I, said the fly...
nor me, said the flea......

Speaking of things the world will little note nor long remember...
When a spokesperson for a California Stateworkers union opined that the almost 80 million dollars that the State would save by cutting two holidays wasn’t “enough to make a difference”....it reminded me that a once upon a time Congressman, Senator Everett Dirksen, famously stated that, “a million here and a million there and pretty soon, you’re talking real money.”
We get similar reactions from every agency that is facing cuts, that cutting their particular budget won’t be enough to make a significant difference.
Except, we got into this budget mess by spending a million here and a million there until we’re now facing a 15 billion (that’s billion with a B) dollar deficit.
And the way to get out of it is by cutting a million here and a million there....
Herbert Hoover was elected President in 1928. Good times in 1928. Then came ‘29 and the stock market crashed. Hoover was considered to be smart and astute and a failure. He’s consistently ranked as one of our worst Presidents by virtue of having been in office when the economy tanked.
FDR got credit for leading the US out of “The Great Depression” but the truth is the New Deal tactics didn’t work. Between Hoover and Roosevelt, they managed what should have been brief downturn in the market into ten years of massive unemployment. Eventually the market corrected itself and with the advent of World War II, entered a fifty year era of prosperity.
But bubbles burst. T’is the nature of the beast.
This huge buyout (the 700 billion plus) engineered by the White House and Congress amounts to nationalization of our banks, our industries and our manufacturers. The politicians who think they know how to get us out of this mess are the self-same politicians that got us into the mess in the first place.
California, the ubiquitous ‘they’ say, is where it happens first..... and the California Legislature is gonna push the state into bankruptcy....the state is facing something like a 22 billion dollar a year deficit and no matter how Arnie begs, the legislature remains obdurant....with neither the Republicans nor the Democrats willing to compromise at any level.....someone, I disremember who, once famously said, “How General Motors goes, so goes the nation.”......Quite possibly, how California goes is the blueprint for the nation....the future looks bleak and, as Pogo once wisely opined, “I have seen the enemy and he is us.”
Who’ll stop the rain...
not I, said the fly.....
nor me, said the flea......