Long, but right on the mark.
"California Poppy" <GoldenStatePoppy@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:cd5c027d-4a95-4943-9059-b5d8c67945d2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
and giraffes and politics
By Dan Walters - dwalters@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
12:00 am PST Monday, February 4, 2008
A tiger escapes from its compound at the San Francisco Zoo, kills one
young man and severely mauls two others before police arrive and kill
the animal.
So what do zoo officials do? They hire a high-powered public relations
operative to spin the story and blame the victims, hinting that one or
more of them taunted the tiger.
Hello. Even if the tiger was taunted - which remains unproven - the
enclosure should have been escape-proof, but it was substantially
lower than national zoo standards for visitor safety.
Eighty miles to the northeast, Sacramento's city zoo is having
problems of its own. Its three giraffes, The Sacramento Bee reveals,
are being housed in a 50-year-old barn that's rotting and infested
with rats, but bond money to build a replacement was diverted into
projects with more political clout.
There is a direct relation****p between these two situations and the
state's political problems - and no, it's not because the Capitol
often resembles a zoo. It is the tendency of governments at all levels
to expand horizontally, involving themselves in ever-greater areas of
activity without prioritizing or fully weighing the consequences.
The result is what one might term half-baked government. Governments
do a lot of things, but by spreading their resources so thinly, they
rarely do any of them really well. The costs - and the taxes to pay
for them - continue to rise. But the public's frustration at the poor
results increase, fueling cynicism and, in California at least, ballot
measures that attempt, and usually fail, to make government more
responsive.
To return to the zoos, if city governments take it upon themselves to
offer such educational entertainment to the public, they then
implicitly promise to operate facilities safely and humanely; ergo, if
they lack the will or capability to do that, they should get out of
the zoo business.
The state's budget crisis stems, at least in part, from the everything-
for-everyone philosophy that permeates the Capitol. Politicians pass
laws and/or throw money at problems with little thought to efficacy.
The state winds up with a lot of agencies and programs that don't work
particularly well.
Take, for example, the largest single public enterprise, K-12
education. While California languishes near the bottom in national
academic tests and somewhat below average in per-pupil spending,
countless billions of dollars are spent on political nostrums, called
"categorical aids," rather than focused on basic academic skills of
its lowest-achieving children. That's why an exhaustive study of the
state's schools, conducted under the auspices of Stanford University,
concluded that while they need more money, it would be useless to
spend more without deep-seated reforms.
Another example surfaced when state Sen. Dave Cox, R-Fair Oaks,
revealed that the "First 5" commissions created to spend money raised
by a special tax on cigarettes a decade ago for children's health are
sitting on more than 2 billion unspent dollars at a time when the
state is contemplating cutting health care because of its budget
crisis.
The syndrome's biggest example may be Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
scheme to expand health insurance to the millions of uninsured
Californians. Although his pal, Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, twisted
arms to get it out of his house, the Senate slowed down and subjected
it - a gasp of surprise is warranted - to serious analysis and
hearings. Its rosy assumptions and downside risks then became
graphically evident.
Although there were other factors, such as high-powered lobbying by
opponents, the plan's obvious deficiencies rightfully sunk it in the
Senate. It simply didn't make sense, kind of like building a tiger
cage with a too-low fence or housing giraffes in a rat-infested barn
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