At the state of The World these days. Getting on The News is less than stellar entertainment. You'd think that with all the information available for people to portray now that there would be some happier news and there is, here and there, but the majority of The News is a 'shocking assessment of the current human condition/trajectory'. Or is it?
Looking out my window here, it looks pretty peaceful and when The News is over it's still that way. People on the street don't seem to be concerned about much.
Cameras can point in all directions but they are used as narrow focusing devices a lot of the time. Certain ones in the media use them selectively, which is no different than the way many newspapers used to be ran, so none of this is new. I've been presented with 'The News' all of my life, a decades-long ongoing commercial for special interests of one kind or another and while not pleasant to watch, I am immune to its effects to a great degree, as I am to commercials or ads of any kind. Were I not, my house would be filled with products that I don't really want, and it isn't. Neither is my head.
But, The News keeps trying to grab viewer's attention and put its version of reality in there and it looks like for followers of some politicians, a switchover has definitely happened. Judging by their fervor, they have found a champion for their cause(s). Rally around that package of ideas as much as you want, citizens, but there is such a thing as math, and math never lies.
Choppering in to the finance meeting
Osman Rana- Unsplash.com
The bottom line in government is math. Somebody has to pay for every little thing and so a great big book is created, a ledger, which details income and expenditures and is called 'The Budget'.
Now it don't matter if you're a city, a county, a school district, a state, or the federal government, you have to wrestle with income and expenditures and those have to hopefully add up to something near zero when it's all said and done or you're going to have a deficit. (There might be a surplus, but those are exceedingly rare).
Taxation is that income coming in, all governments run on taxation. When Joe Citizen pumps gas, a lot of the price of that gas is taxes. When Jane Voter goes to the store and buys a loaf of bread she pays sales tax. On and on like that.
Joe Politician is saddled with the onerous job of gathering the support of certain taxpayers (voters) and then wrangling with other politicans that are trying to please their voters and it all comes down to where the money is flowing and who gets it. Laws that politicians pass are ways of funneling money this way and that, if you haven't already noticed.
And there ain't any issue that doesn't have a cost attached to it, somehow, someway. It might not be a direct cost, it might be a social cost somewhere down the line that's gonna have to be dealt with sooner or later because government is usually, but not always, left with the undesirable jobs of looking out for the least fortunate, dealing with the mentally ill, housing prisoners, protecting its citizens, and dealing with the trash. All of that (and there's lots more!) costs money.
So politicians can go around and spout all the nonsense they want and rile up their followers but after that, they have to figure out how to pay for what they've said and that's when those promises usually fall short. Reality sets in and that reality is mathematics, which can't be argued with because no matter how you explain reality to math, it keeps on adding up two plus two to make four.
So what politicians do is they hide math, or delay math, or bury math in piles of other equations but even so, that doesn't change things one whit.
Eventually, math catches up to politicians. It always does. Might not be the same politicians, though. They might have moved on, or be blaming the ones across the aisle for the fix they're presently in, but math just sits there as always, precise and real and untouched by all the weirdness going on around it. Math can't go there, because it's unalterable.
So if you want to know what the real issues are, take a look at a budgetary pie chart and see how fat or thin that pie its being sliced, and who is getting what slice on their plate. That's what all the ruckus is about. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.