What shall we do when a depression or recession arrives?
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by Jack Stapleton Jr.
I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, particularly Missouri’s politicians whose sins and foibles make life bearable for the strange little group of us who record their misdeeds, but I often wonder if anyone in Jefferson City has given more than a passing moment to considering what 5.4 million citizens of our state will do when the downpour starts. By downpour, I’m not referring to a deluge of rain but the sudden and highly unpleasant arrival of a recession or a full- blown depression.
As much as I try to avoid thinking of the consequences of the return of hard times in America, the thought becomes even more persistent the minute a session of the General Assembly ends and the final details of an annual budget become known. As one who spent some of his early childhood in Jefferson City, I can still recall the time (seems like only yesterday) our governor received the munificent sum of $5,000 a year and legislators earned $5 for each day in session
To add to my uneasiness, I recently discovered that state government spending had more than doubled in just 10 years, increasing 118% between Fiscal Year 1990 and 2000. Now to someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, an increase of such proportions isn’t unusual, and as one of my optimistic friends likes to say, it’s not that Missouri has engaged in deficit spending to reach the $16 billion-plus budgets of today.
We have had the revenue, thanks to a general and in some ways strange period of economic prosperity, and we have spent the money, for the most part, for good purposes. No thinking citizen begrudges the annual expenditure of $4 billion on public schools, even if we don’t have the slightest idea of what a billion dollars really is. And most of us, I suspect, were cheered by the fact that our state-supported colleges and universities are now receiving more than $1 billion in taxpayer money even as thoughtful Missourians worry about what seems to be an inordinate number of these institutions.
Guided by the law of influence and politics, we handsomely regard our elected officials, judges and department directors with both high salaries and generous pensions, and we consistently underpay our mental hospital workers, prison guards and clerical workers with average salaries and small pensions. We have always underpaid our most dedicated public servants: nurses, police, guards, clerks, never worrying that someday they might walk off the job and leave the work for those who have benefitted the most. I didn’t claim our state’s prosperity has been even, or consistent.
To protect ourselves from a disturbing minority of criminals, we have built more prisons than hospitals in the last decade, and we have changed, for the worse, how we treat the mentally retarded. Somehow believing the falsehood that we can best treat our most disturbed citizens by adding to their distress, we have downsized institutions and even torn down perfectly good structures, in order to place these special people in neighborhoods where even so-called normal citizens are afraid to live. Someday we will have to correct this horrible crime against our unfortunate neighbors, but to be honest, I don’t know where the money will come from.
We have a 15-Year Road Plan that may take 30 years to complete, a loosely supervised university system that is captive to enrollment competition and empire building. We have spent $3.4 billion to desegregate public schools in our two largest cities and for this investment we have received two monumentally inept and inadequate school districts that are guaranteed to turn out under-educated and ill-prepared graduates.
What happens to minimum-wage welfare mothers who are leaving their children for most of the day to receive pay that barely buys the essentials when the next recession makes even these jobs disappear? What happens when the next revenue crunch causes another round of closing state alcohol and drug clinics and the nearest one is two counties away? And what occurs in our neighborhoods when there aren’t enough parole officers to supervise the growing number of released prison inmates?
Increased spending is both wonderful and dangerous. Wonderful because it solves at least some of society’s escalating problems. Dangerous because it lulls us into believing it will never end. But it does, friend, it always does.