The decline of western civilization

With the floundering of the U.S. economy, one of the major things on every politician’s mind is how to reduce the budget and do it in a way that is effective without cutting essential services.  Unfortunately, the nature of what is essential varies from person to person. 

Further misfortune demands that politicians side with those who gave them the money to elected in the first place, meaning that special interests usually get a break from having their funding hit, whether they serve a useful function or not.  This means that some of the first things that the government looks at when figuring how to lessen the federal and state bills are services that mean a lot to the average citizen, many of them a direct reflection on how far we've come as a country and as a species. 

Education is perhaps the most obvious of these.  Stealing money from schools may seem to many politicians to be an easy way to save cash, but it will inevitably have horrible impacts on the progression of our society and, due to a lack of proper brain power in the country, will grow to affect our competitiveness in the world market. 

While a big company like McDonalds can export its franchise and rake in more money for themselves, there’s no way for a typical burger-slinger to export the hamburgers that they make.  Therefore, their time is wasted, time that could be used, should they have been educated in some advanced field, to create new innovations.

Another area hit hard by budget cuts is that of national and state parks.  These areas are more than just beautiful bits of nature, protected from development as an environmental responsibility.  They also bring in tourist dollars.  Even if they don’t pay for themselves in that regard, forcing federal funding, the very fact that tourists are drawn to these parks means that they’ll be in the country and spending money.  If they can’t come and see what they want to see, they may not come at all.

Another round of budget cuts is coming up soon (this time forced by Congress’s incompetence) and it looks like Park Services will be hit in the pocketbook yet again.  They've already made their intention to reduce the budget of national parks by five percent (approximately $30 million in total), which means those parks will be unable to stay open as long, will be forced to unload employees and may even have to shut down areas of the parks completely due to an inability to keep them running properly and safely.  The current numbers for some of the parks are, for example, $1.8 million at Yellowstone, almost a million and a half at Yosemite and a little over a million for the Grand Canyon, though every park will feel the hit.

What makes this even worse, and what schools gratefully don’t have to deal with when their own funding gets cut, is that National Parks Services will have very little time to implement their new, tighter budget.  Mistakes will be made, quality will suffer and what may be a cut of $1 million may feel more like twice that due to inefficiency.

One more area that always suffers, regardless of the fact that it seems ludicrous, is that of medical care.  Special needs and services for the elderly seem to take hits every round of budgeting as well.  The people who need the help of the government the most are the very ones being targeted as less-than-important.  Mental health facilities also frequently endure shut-downs and cuts - another group of people who desperately need money to be sent their way.

The entire budgeting process is indicative of a breakdown in the ability of the government to get their shit together.  Bi-partisan politics creates internal bickering and special interests create immunity to the cuts where there should be none.  It makes it near impossible to manage the budget properly and cut out what really needs to be gone.  We've spent more than 200 years building up our country into the place it is today, with our once-excellent education system, assistance for the most vulnerable members of our society and national parks to protect the loss of our beautiful natural environment.  If corruption can’t be stopped and good sense adhered to, we will be stuck in a slow decline that we will likely not even notice until it’s way too late.

Money photo courtesy of Milad Mosapoor via Wikicommons

Congress photo courtesy of The White House Blog via Wikicommons