Public Disconnect from Government Reality

I have railed against the woes of big government on numerous blogs. It is incapable of addressing the needs of everyone and instead the focus is its own need for self preservation. One of the ways that is done is by disconnecting the citizen from the workings of the government. The larger, more removed a government becomes, the less possible it is for people to grasp the true size and nature of the institution. In my own life proof of this disconnect is playing out in the public schools.

As everyone in Wisconsin knows, Walker is trying to reduce the size of government. One way to do that is decrease the amount of money it draws in. By default, with less tax money to spend, cuts must be made and the government shrinks. The new budget has a proposed reduction in the amount the states subsidizes public education. Local school districts will receive less State dollars per pupil than they have in the past. Obviously, this really turns the screws on the budgets of those school districts.

In my own school district, a letter went out to student families from the Superintendent and the President of the School Board. It was asking our community families to lobby the state government in an effort to persuade them to undo the proposed reduction in funds.

Here is where the disconnect comes in. The essence of this request from the school board goes like this:

“The community of Greendale is unable to support its own school system. As such, please contact your legislator and request that they take money out of another Wisconsin communities and give it to Greendale.”

This type of request is only possible if the size of government has reached a point that people no longer understand what their tax money is actually supporting. People tend to fight locally against a rise in taxes, mainly because they have direct knowledge of its use. The separation between local and state government offers multiple layers of cover so the funnelling/redistribution of money easily becomes obscured.

So school districts, receiving unmarked bills from the state, have been allowed to indulge themselves in spending. When the duffle bags of unmarked bills are halted, suddenly school districts are out of money. Rather than address their needs to the community they cry victimhood status and beg the state to assist. They expect an ignorant community, conditioned to believe that state money doesn’t come out their own pocketbook, to follow along.

*Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net