Remembering 2 1/2 Reasons Why Sequestration is all Hype

I’ve always had a great love of His­tory and when I entered High School my goal was to become a His­tory Teacher. How­ever in high school two things hap­pened that put me in a totally dif­fer­ent direction.

The very first com­put­ers came to my High School (apple 2c’s) Yes believe it or not I did my first pro­gram­ming and wrote my first games on Apples.

The sec­ond thing was the pas­sage of Propo­si­tion 2 ¹⁄₂. It lim­ited the amount that a city or town could raise prop­erty taxes with­out a vote to “override”

When propo­si­tion 2 ¹⁄₂ came up we were told most emphat­i­cally that this was going to be dis­as­ter. the state leg­is­la­ture, still over­whelm­ingly demo­c­rat (although Gov­er­nor King was that rare crea­ture a fis­cally con­ser­v­a­tive Demo­c­rat was in the Cor­ner Office, the pre­lude to the future GOP strength in the 90’s) how­ever Cit­i­zens for lim­ited Tax­a­tion man­aged to unite tax­pay­ing cit­i­zens against the bill and it won via a referendum.

After the mea­sure was passed prac­ti­cally EVERY teacher at the High School was given a pink slip directly after the elec­tion. (One teacher gen­er­ated a lot of laughs by ask­ing the stu­dents “do you want to see my pink slip?” and when they said “yes” rais­ing her skirt just enough to see her slip which was in fact pink). Today that would get you fired but in my day we had a sense of humor.

But then after all the worry the teach­ers were put through a strange thing happened:

Noth­ing!

The next year the teach­ers were still there, the school was still there and every­thing pretty much remained as it had been before. It put the lie to the hype.

Fast for­ward 30 years later and after four years of incred­i­ble spend­ing the prospect of rolling back 2% of that spend­ing increase is being laid on so thick you would think it was the great­est dis­as­ter to hit the United States since Sep­tem­ber 11^th 2001.

I sus­pect this admin­is­tra­tion will do all it can to cre­ate visu­als of trou­ble and pain from the sequester start­ing with stuff like this:

Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment offi­cials have released “sev­eral hun­dred” immi­grants from depor­ta­tion cen­ters across the coun­try, say­ing the move is an effort to cut costs ahead of bud­get cuts due to hit later this week.

Expect more of this, because even if the sky doesn’t fall I sus­pect the media will do their best to pre­tend it is, at least for as long as they think they can get away for it.

Update: Sen­tence chopped off some­how, restored.

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The ther­mome­ter hasn’t moved but you might notice its design has changed.

If you’ve had trou­ble get­ting to this site, that’s because the plu­gin that gen­er­ated the old ther­mome­ter was mess­ing up the code of the blog some­thing fierce. That likely caused both the trou­ble of get­ting to the site and the lack of move­ment in the totals for the week.

Los­ing 24 hours cer­tainly hasn’t helped but you can by being one of the 14 remain­ing peo­ple I need to kick in $20 by Sat­ur­day (and at least 3 by Thurs­day to make the monthly goal) so this weeks pay­check can take place.

It’s all up to you