Opinion: Column
Nursing or not, pork harmful to fiscal health
Looking for a print version?
Simply use your browser’s ‘Print’ command and a printer-friendly document will be generated automatically.
Also by Eric Schmidt:
- Cap Times living in an industrial fantasy land (July 6, 2009)
- Looking for something to do? Why not announce your County Board run? (June 19, 2009)
- 'In Defense' of a better campus book choice (June 13, 2009)
Sharing tools:
E-mail this article:
One tried-and-true criterion of dystopian societies — immortalized in sci-fi B-movies aplenty (which your friendly local Four Star employee will happily rattle off for you) — is the “perpetual construction and renovation.” In an effort to mask the futility of perfectionism, the logic goes, bureaucrats will leave no space undeveloped, no unrequested building un-built, no unaffordable construction project unfunded.
And since students these days just flat aren’t getting their deserved fill of dystopian literature — and buying a red cup has a less complex payoff than renting “Brazil” from Netflix — our state budget committee continues to show us how it’s done. And God bless them for it. At the top of everyone’s wish list this Christmas was obviously a new $47 million nursing facility at UW. The facility was in such high demand that no administrators asked for it and Gov. Jim Doyle (not exactly the prototypical fiscal conservative) omitted the clearly-necessary building from his budget request. So the budget committee, of course, listened to the clear signs of nursing catastrophe and approved the borrowing of $28 million to fulfill the public wishes. Good lord.
I doubt that Doyle or the Legislature will approve this project, but the gesture should not go unnoticed by the public. Once again, construction is being proposed at UW whose relative urgency falls somewhere between replacing your shower squeegee and preparing a state funeral for David Carradine. This kind of thing is called ”pork,” if you have any doubt — legislators given discretion to fund any number of pet projects without much regard for public need or affordability. We heard a lot about it in 2008, and the Democratic Party spent a lot of time promising to — you know — get rid of this shit. Clearly the priorities of national parties are blissfully ignored by their state-level surrogates. According to news reports, your elected representatives on the budget committee, exhausted from a late-night debate over funding priorities, saw fit to compromise on a facility that was not on anyone’s radar.
The brainchild of this project was Senator Judy Robson, D-Beloit, described by the Wisconsin State Journal as “a former nurse,” which apparently gives the good senator license to slowly destroy the state’s vulnerable bond rating. The nominal reasoning for this is a very-real “nursing shortage” in the state. This is the hidden genius of pork — it is almost always framed in relatively unobjectionable terms, by people with the occupational street cred to propose fixing specific problems, leaving opponents looking like evil bastards who are militantly opposed to making peoples’ lives better. Who can argue with addressing a nursing shortage, after all? Who can argue against having enough nurses?
Well, I can, in this case, because I possess a modest understanding of what democracy is and what it isn’t. Pork is the opposite of democracy. It sucks the life out of democracy and leaves decisions to the bureaucrats. Even under relatively-tranquil democratic conditions, the relationship between the University of Wisconsin and taxpayers is frigid enough without this recent partisan movement to spend money on the university without meaningful internal discussion. And the stupidity of this gesture would be breathtaking enough in isolation, without a backdrop of UW-supported building projects whose own frivolousness could fill another 10 columns. These late-night unsolicited government shopping sprees, down all the wrong aisles for all the wrong reasons, deserve more contempt than this writer is capable of expressing.
Herald Blogs
The Beat Goes On
Muckrakers
President’s Visit Marked a Speech to One of the Last Groups Not Critical of Him
Extra Points
Top Classified Ads (view all)
HOUSES FOR Fall 2010. All houses are on W Dayton or N Bassett. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 bedrooms. All have parking. madisoncampusrentals.com
Leave a comment