Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

The Clown and the Cop

By TIMOTHY EGAN
June 14, 2012, 9:00 pm

Trapped with a Fox News big screen in my stable of fellow trotters at the gym a few weeks ago, I took in the worldview that may give the White House to Republicans this year. After burning 400 calories, I was ready to torch the capital.

For almost half an hour I heard another rehash of how my tax dollars were spent on a clown, a comic and a mind reader at a retreat for government workers outside Las Vegas in 2010. Those tin-eared bureaucrats in the General Services Administration spent a total of $835,000. An outrage, of course, and it was typical, I was informed, of runaway government spending under Barack Obama.

Not mentioned during my face time with Fox was a defense bill passed by the House that same day authorizing $642 billion in spending next year — almost $8 billion more than the Defense Department asked for. And this vote broke a promise by the Tea Party-backed Congress, when they agreed last year to cut defense spending over 10 years.

Question: Which is more important, a bunch of clowns spending on a clown, for less than a million dollars, or a Congress that threw more than a thousand times that amount at things that are considered unnecessary — outdated bases, pie-in-the-sky contractor schemes — by the very people who are supposed to spend it?

The clown, clearly. Why? Because most people are unaware that the Republican majority, the same politicians who rode into office in 2010 on a pledge of not spending beyond our means, voted to run up the deficit last month on behalf of those parochial projects.

But nearly everyone knows about the clown, the comic and the mind reader. And to be fair to Fox, which is more than it is on any given day, the lamestream media has had plenty of stories about the Vegas debacle and very little on the padding for the Pentagon.

Elections are about narrative; as such, money and partisan reporting are vital to shape a story line that moves a majority of voters. A central Republican message is that government spending is out of control under Obama, and most of those outlays are wasteful. Do the facts have a chance? Let’s give it a try.

First, you have to go back to Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, more than 50 years ago, to find a rate of federal spending growth lower than that of the Obama administration. This counterintuitive conclusion was reported last month by Rex Nutting in MarketWatch, a Web site affiliated with The Wall Street Journal. It’s been labeled “mostly true” by the nonpartisan referee Politifact, though others have challenged the premise of the piece. Nutting took much of 2009 out of Obama’s column because the spending was authorized in the last year of the Bush presidency.

But even when he’s tagged with most of 2009’s outlays — including the stimulus, which saved more than one million jobs — Obama is a relative miser on the growth chart. Still, Mitt Romney continues to say that under Obama, federal spending “has accelerated at a rate without precedent.” Of course, Obama would like to spend more, and if given a free hand, may rise to a level justifying Romney’s claim.

Which brings us to the second part of the argument, on the nature of government spending. Certainly, there are perennial abuses that feed public distrust. Not just the clown, but municipal workers who get outsize benefits. It erodes support for helping the poor when the director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority can get $260,000 a year in base salary.

But for every bureaucrat living in a McMansion while doling out vouchers for people in leaky trailers, there are honest cops, hardworking teachers, gutsy firefighters and tireless enforcers of laws that protect our air, water and public lands.

In Romney’s view, these public servants are dishonorable, and maybe even less American. “We have 145,000 more government workers under this president,” Romney said in Colorado last month. “Let’s send them back home and put you back to work.”

Again, this is simply not true. Under Obama, public sector employment has fallen by more than 600,000 workers. Obama has tried to increase these rolls — adding teachers, cops and firefighters under federal grants used for the last 50 years — but has been stymied by a Congress that wants to end his presidency by sabotaging the economy. And so long as people believe government money is more likely to be spent on a clown instead of a cop, the Congress can act without consequence.

There’s also the notion of “send them home,” as if these workers were some kind of foreign element in our midst. They are home, in the uniforms of their calling. Look around, and you’ll see them in harm’s way, rushing to wildfires in the West, strapping on bullet-proof vests before going out in 100-degree heat, showing up at 6 a.m. to prepare the day’s lessons for your kid.

Steve Jobs famously said in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech that “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Similarly, presidential elections are too important to be guided by someone else’s facts.


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/the-clown-and-the-cop/?ref=opinion

Just WAIT for IT! ..IF ..romney wins, the FIRST THINGS he will do are EXACTLY IDENTICAL to what Obama has been TRYING to do to INCREASE jobs ...!........because mi misreables .... there is no other freaking WAY to do it and YOU know it! NOW, HE could follow Europes FAILED WAY.. worse austerity then it is now ..but somehow I believe that HE will want to MAKE SURE! that 'he' cuts the unemployment rate ! ... because of course! .... 'a socialist kenyan doesn't KNOW how to do it .. but an AMERICAN VULTURE CAPITALIST .. does! after all, He learned from reading HOW FDR did it! ... ......just wait for it! IF the unthinkable happens .... ;(