January 11, 2012 12:18 PM
Becoming a fiscal conservative
Great article - based on experience and common sense. When someone has an open mind, they can take in new information and change their opinions to conform to revealed reality:The day I became a fiscal conservative
Written by Warren Cole SmithJanuary 10, 2012, 12:50 PM
t was the fall of 1981. The United States was coming out of a recession. Ronald Reagan had been president since January. Among his first acts in the White House had been to dramatically cut spending for social programs.And the woman sitting next to me on an airplane was not happy about it.
I was sitting on the aisle, and she had the window. She worked for an organization called Camp Fire Girls, now called Camp Fire USA, and she couldn't stand Ronald Reagan. I wanted to know why. She described an after-school program she ran that served hundreds of poor children. I remember thinking then that it sounded like a worthwhile endeavor. The program had received about $100,000--almost its entire budget--from the federal government. Reagan had eliminated that funding.
In 1981 I was a young man whose thinking was in a state of transition. In 1976 I had voted for Jimmy Carter, but in 1980 I pulled the lever for Reagan, in part because of I thought Carter had shown general incompetency regarding economic matters. I had graduated from college in 1980, in the midst of the Carter Recession. I then spent more than a year in a series of part-time and temporary jobs, all the while looking for full-time employment. I had voted for Reagan not so much because I was a conscious part of the "Reagan Revolution," but because--like many who voted for Barack Obama in 2008--I was hoping for change.
So when this Camp Fire Girl leader started railing against Reagan, I offered no defense. "That's terrible," I said. "Sorry that program got eliminated. What do you do now?"
"Oh," she said. "I still run the program."
I was confused. "I thought you said Reagan eliminated the program," I said.
"We weren't going to give him the satisfaction," she said defiantly. "So we started raising money."
She described how local corporations pitched in. Plus, lots of individuals. They held fund-raisers. They even asked the parents whose daughters participated in the program to pay a little, to give them a stake in what was being accomplished. As she told this story, I could hear the excitement and pride rising in her voice. She said the after-school program now had a budget of almost $250,000, more twice what the federal government had cut. It was serving more girls than ever. In fact, she said she was on her way to speak at a conference to discuss the program's success.
"Well," I said, emboldened by her story to make a feeble defense, "it sounds like Ronald Reagan was the best thing that ever happened to that program."
Read more at World magazine
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Comments
Excellent article. I totally agree with Mr. Smith. Many of my relatives and friends are social workers or mental health workers, and hearing them discuss their jobs, I'm convinced they often, unknowingly, do more harm than good to people and families. Most times they tell me they vote Democratic just to keep their funding for their jobs. Social work for dysfunctional families and teens is a rapidly growing field, and the paychecks mainly come from government programs. In my state, they are placing government program offices in unmarked, non-descript industrial buildings so the general public doesn't know how many offices and employees they have.
Posted by: Marie | January 11, 2012 3:12 PM
