The year is 1940, a poor Dakota family heard there were jobs in Seattle so they moved and the father immediately found work at a factory building things for the war effort. They rented a three bedroom home. The parents slept on the sofa, the five children slept on the floors of the living room and the hallway. The three bedrooms were rented out for income. Those three renters also got first chance at the one bathroom, the use of the kitchen and the eating table. They needed the money to make everything work.
No one in the family thought anything but how lucky they were to have a safe warm roof over their head, plenty of food and the head of the family with a job.
The state of Washington is cutting one billion dollars of spending before June. After June there will be a cut of 5 billion dollars from the state budget. I imagine my granddaughter will no longer be in a Gifted and Talented program at the public school and my brother's hospice program will be seriously changed.
Department heads of the state have been told to look for duplicates and individuals that can do two jobs. Unemployment benefits from the state will no doubt be rescheduled even as new people become unemployed.
I remember reading about a plane load of pallets of cash being flown into Baghdad in the early year of the war. Bundles of hundred dollar bills wrapped in clear plastic being thrown around as footballs.
That was the day, in my mind, we became a banana republic. The nation's compass broken for good.
In 2012 New York state will have to cut $8.5 billion from their budget.
ReplyDeleteAs you point out, war is a bad investment. What will be our return on the $1.4 trillion spent on war the past nine years? And Obama says we will be in Afghanistan thru 2015!