Hmmm...Where To Cut???

dogsoldier — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 02:33:43 GMT

EP here has this nifty online Colorado budget balancing tool. You can find it on the home page. The thing about is that you can't comment on it. So, rather than fight another uphill battle, I should post something to a topic that has had no comments, yet is most definately on the Ritter hit list to bring the budget under control.

I actually used the online tool. This site doesn't indicate the input today but that was me. Guess what. I balanced the budget. I didn't do it by hacking away at needed educational and human services programs, as the Denver Post would have everyone think to be the "majority" of Colorado opinion. Nope. I looked at where the money was being "played". Most of it can be recovered from increased taxes and less perks to corporations, and some adjustments to the "other" categories. Those "other" categories would include the enormous overhead and six-figure (I sh_t you not) salaries of the lower-tiered staff in the Departments of the Governor's Cabinet. A CORA request produced a salary of a HCPF staff member (that would be Medicaid, as in Health Care Reform) that was over ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH!!! I forgot to mention the paid for health insurance benefits and the "company" cars: Cadillac Escalades.

If you want to balance the budget, you have to follow the REAL money going out in perks and salaries; not the services or educational needs that are in the pony cart headed for the guillotine, along with their very human victims. There is no "cake" for anyone living at $12,000 or less a year to eat. And that "or less" part will become even smaller, while the sick and homeless population swells beyond containment, when the Aid to the Needy Disabled program is demolished on January 1. Yeppers. That huge $200 a month that about 30,000 families have to live on if they are disabled and pending SSI or their SSDI entitlement gets flushed with nary a buh-bye from the gentry.

...and that's only just the start of it, folks.

So, what would you like to do, if not for yourselves, then for your children? Cut those six-figure salaries, corporate perks, Pinnacol Assurance profits ($700 billion with a B), tax credits for the wealthy and the oil and gas industry magnates, uncover the under-the-table pay- offs for permits, to name a few? Or holler, "There's gold in them thar hills!" and head straight for the Capitol with a paring knife to hack off the pork and get your children medical care, school lunches, a decent teacher to student ratio, or even that piddly $200 bucks a month that keep cancer patients sort of alive until the government decides that cancer is a disabling condition f'rinstance?

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Hmmm...Where To Cut???