An Oz-like surrealism to budget

By Steve Wiegand - Sacramento Bee - Saturday, June 23, 2007

Once upon a time, in a land called Caleefornya, the grand advisers to the Wizard of Arnold gathered in the wizard’s Tent of Many Smokes to discuss the kingdom’s finances.

There were gathered the usual suspects: brainless scarecrows, heartless tin woodsmen, cowardly lions, and winged monkeys armed with press cards and notebooks.

The minions of He-Who-Flexes were faced with a grave and perilous problem. The kingdom was spending more than it collected from its subjects.

A report by the Ministerial Vizier for Finance had reported the kingdom’s budget for the coming year might be short by more than 2,000,000,000 Schwarzies.

That, everyone agreed, was indeed a grave and perilous chunk of change. But the advisers could not agree on what to do.

The tin woodsmen brandished their axes and called for cutting and cutting, mostly from programs that helped the kingdom’s least well-off subjects, such as welfare for poor kids and mass transit programs.

The kingdom must live within its means, they said. It’s never too early to get poor kids used to being poor, and since many of the poor don’t work, they don’t need mass transit.

Then the woodsmen sang:

“Oh the budget we’d be mending,

“When we cut down on the spending,

“We mean right down to the floor.

“Doo doo doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.

“We could pacify the masses,

“And not look like such asses,

“If we take it from the poor.”

The brainless scarecrows howled in protest, dancing spastically across the floor. You can’t keep cutting programs that help the most disadvantaged, they said. A key reason for having a government is to help those who can’t help themselves.

Besides, they said, the kingdom has lots of problems that need fixing right now. Let’s approve a kind of spending where we get the money for building moats and catapults now, and let someone else worry about paying it back, with interest, later. Let’s just keep spending and hope for the best.

Then they too broke out in song:

“If we just spend all the money,

“The present will be sunny,

“And everyone will smile.

“Doo doo doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.

“Of course we’ll look like moochers

“As we steal from our kids’ futures,

“But by then we’ll be senile.”

In the corner, meanwhile, the cowardly lions were timidly formulating their own plan.

Maybe we should cut some spending and raise some taxes, they said, and maybe not approve any new programs unless we tie them to specific new funding sources or to specific cuts in existing programs.

One idea might be to raise the tax on chariot fuel and make sure the money goes to fixing old roads and building new ones, or putting more coaches out there.

And in soft voices, the lions sang:

“Oh we’d be fit as a fiddle

“If we split things down the middle,

“And from there didn’t swerve.

“Doo doo doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.

“We could keep faith with the voters,

“And keep them from our throaters,

“If we only had the nerve.”

When the singing stopped, there was a pregnant pause. Then, from behind the curtain to the left of the giant screen along one wall of the tent, came a familiar-if-somewhat-hard-to-understand voice:

“It’s fantastic that you are all putting forth ideas that will make this fantastic kingdom even more fantastic. When we work together like this, the results are fantastic.

“I’m off to Paris and London. Let me know how it comes out.”

from the The Sacramento Bee

http://www.sacbee.com/111/v-print/story/237520.html