Government needs to operate with the funds it has available rather than what they would like to have.

This past week we were told the state of Tennessee is looking real hard down the barrel of a locked and loaded billion dollar budget deficit. Then on Thursday, Oct. 15, Rep. Jimmie Naifeh, former speaker of the Tennessee House, stated "No one has got the backbone or the guts to even talk about revenue enhancement." We all know what that means, the big "I" ... income tax. This, with an "official" Tennessee unemployment rate of 10.5% in September, down from 10.8% in August, later revised to 10.7%, but up from 6.9% in September of 2008 (source - Chattanoogan.com, Oct. 15).

And from whence have those September jobs come? Direct and indirect government employment ... with close to 100,000 jobs lost in manufacturing, retail, and trades just last month. But the unemployment rate is seasonally adjusted, and one month does not a trend make.

With an "officially reported" national unemployment rate of 9.8%, trending up, and an estimated actual unemployment rate of 17% or better, the feds aren't doing any better. They just fudge their numbers more expertly.

With a deficit that's increased by 1.4 trillion, with a capital "T," dollars just this year we're supposed to entrust ever more control of our lives to some government functionary? This is even without health care destruction, cap and trade, and oh so many of those "green jobs" we'll have ... like the two bio-diesel refineries that have shut down over in Memphis and the switchgrass refinery that's now a research facility up at UT, all on the heels of news that there's a world wide glut of solar and wind power generating equipment sitting around like that ole bole weevil, looking for a home. How many windmills did T. Boone Pickens buy, and is now trying to sell.

And Governor Bredesen wants to spend millions of our tax dollars on a solar power generating facility ... in the middle of Jimmie Naifeh and John Wilder's stomping grounds. While he and his wife are having shindigs in their new, $18,000,000 underground dance hall up at the governor's pad?

For Hamilton Countians to spend at least $288,000 per promised job here at the new VW facility is a shame but hardly holds a candle to the $550,000 per job created by President Obama's "stimulus package," and both of those are still better than the $2,000,000 those folks over in Bradley County are spending for each job at the Wacker plant.

It isn't bad enough they throw our money around as if it's nothing more than toilet paper, they're spending money our grandchildren and great grandchildren have yet to earn. After all, they just take what they want. They don't have to earn it.

Our elected elite, the political class, would play games with the lives and treasure of citizens as if we're nothing more than pieces on the board of a Monopoly game ... but there are real people, real lives, and real futures at stake here.

Chattanooga's Mayor Littlefield has been playing a game of chess with the boys at the county, attempting to force a metro government upon all of us. For what. Chattanooga isn't as large as Nashville, or Atlanta, or Charlotte, but it's large enough to combine all the community and county services ... in his mind. He's willing to tinker with people's lives for his own personal aggrandizement, so he can say it was done on his watch and under his tutelage. All for his name on something, much like Red Bank's Commissioner Floy Pierce wanting her name on a senior citizens' building. And both are willing to spend our tax dollars for their own personal warm and fuzzy feelings. She's no queen, but he certainly might be a rook.

Ah, those games politicians play ... with our lives and our fortunes. And we pay them to do it.

Real lives, real people who get up every morning and go to work to support themselves. And some politician feels it's his right to take away what that person has worked to earn, the results of his labor.

How's that consolidation of Chattanooga city schools and Hamilton County schools working for us? We were told it would cut costs and reduce the number of employees. Both have increased ... but Johnny and Janie can't read, write, or cipher because it's brought the county schools down without bringing the city schools up, and the schools are falling down around our ears.

But we have teachers who cannot understand their salaries are based upon 10 months and 200 work days in a year. At $32,000 to start here in Hamilton County, my slide rule tells me that breaks down to about 20 bucks an hour plus a benefits package many in the real world, the world of profits and losses, would dearly love to have ... not 15 bucks an hour as a seven year teacher recently commented. And Johnny can't read.

All this, with debt that our grandchildren will be paying long after most of us are gone.

Me, me, me, me, me ... sorry, I had an overwhelming desire to practice for an opera solo.

We have elected officials who tout their credentials. One may have a degree in political science, another an MBA, another a PhD in something or other, another a college professor teaching business, but who probably hasn't learned anything about business in decades and will demand the county hold on to a piece of property in the hope it will increase in value rather than sell it for a reasonable price to a willing buyer ... while at the same time we tax payers must foot the bill for maintenance and upkeep of that property, a depreciating property, and be subject to potential liability, with no tax revenue being collected for it. That person apparently never learned that sometimes we have to cut our losses and take a little different path. So what have they learned with all those college degrees. Nut'n.

Langston Hughes once wrote:

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

A broken-winged bird that cannot fly ... an apt description for many of our offspring with the financial future open to them. How do they thrive when they're paying off debt incurred by our elected elite and their appointed bureaucratic government functionaries?

A dear friend recently made a comment about grandmothers in sneakers, how they sometimes meddle where they aren't wanted. Could it be they aren't wanted because they ask too many questions, and those questions might show that politicians' certainly aren't dazzling us with brilliance, so they're trying to baffle us with ... uh, they'll call it Voodoo math. I prefer to call it Hoodoo math, since I'm encouraged not to use that word I learned in charm school.

Perhaps it's time for granny, and her accomplice grumpy grampy, to begin asking those hard questions and meddling where they aren't wanted more frequently. Our children and grandchildren deserve better than what we would lay at their feet right now, today.

Can someone show me how it's possible to borrow our way out of debt? Me, me ... me, me ... and they while away the hours, in their ivory towers ...

Apologies to Joe South.

Royce E. Burrage, Jr.
Royce@Officially Chapped.org