Janesville now has her hundreds of thousands for a bus.
It should be no surprise that those who have flacked every possible public program as the Next Big Thing (no matter how neglectful of dire needs) would herald state and federal grants as though they were genuine, private productivity.
The fawning need to tout the redistribution of private workers’ earnings as public bureaucrats’ finest accomplishments satisfies neither left nor right: the right sees it as excessive spending, and the left sees it as spending on the wrong priorities.
There aren’t many people remaining who truly think that the highest value of others’ earnings is to acquire still more, from the many, for the benefit of the few.
As is true with projects now forgotten or struggling, the justifications for these schemes will change. People who have taken hundreds of thousands from others will shift and dissemble to explain what they’re doing with all that money. Explanations will change, supposedly fundamental goals will metamorphose, each announced as though nothing contradictory had been said only days or weeks earlier.
When a public-man, whose own poor are mostly neglected as bad copy and depressing headlines, tells you that some taxes can be used to leverge still more from others’ earnings, you may be sure he’s lost both his perspective on need and his sense of private accomplishment.
Those large grants aren’t from his pockets, but others; they won’t fill the pocketbooks of the needy, but instead fund his pet projects.
Of course, these men are thrilled, just thrilled: they see their projects ever so clearly, but beyond that, where other needs persist, it’s all a haze.