Posts Tagged budget
While We Are Wringing Our Hands….
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Criminal Justice on March 4th, 2013
While we wait for the impact of sequestration to hit, we might ponder this: In an interview with Spiegel Online, a Harvard economist insisted that we could save an amount equal to the sequestration cuts every year just by ending the War on Drugs. “The prohibition of drugs is the worst solution for preventing abuse,” said [...]
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The Politics of Pay
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Local Government on August 2nd, 2012
Whatever the merits of Mayor Ballard’s decision to give his staff huge pay raises, the “optics,” as they say, are terrible. The upcoming city budget will be more than painful, thanks largely to the ill-conceived “tax caps,” and the cuts to services will be draconian in some places. Giving your buddies in the Mayor’s office [...]
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The Bottom Line
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Local Government on April 24th, 2011
“Keep your eye on the bottom line” is good advice. But it is also a good idea to consider the definition of “bottom line.” In business, the term refers to profitability; too much red ink and the enterprise fails. In government, however, the “bottom line” is generally defined as doing the people’s business while at [...]
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File Under “Kick Them When They’re Down”
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Public Policy and Governance, Random Blogging on April 20th, 2011
The more we see of Paul Ryan’s “innovative” budget proposal, the more mean-spirited it gets. Take Food Stamps–another target for “savings.” According to Meteor Blades over at Daily Kos, Ryan would change food stamp dollars to block grants, which would be funded at only 80 percent of the current level of spending. “That means cuts [...]
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Balancing the Books
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Public Policy and Governance on April 12th, 2011
When most of us talk about “balancing the books,” we have a mental image of a bookkeeping ledger (for those of you too young to recall keeping financial records on paper, those ledgers were books filled with graph-like paper, on which one recorded assets and liabilities). The point was to balance revenues with expenditures. Somehow, [...]
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