Right up there with, “you call that music?”, “now, that was real dancing!” and the classic “close that door, did you grow up in a barn?”, one of the most time honored parental refrains is “money doesn’t grow on trees.”
It’s true, money doesn’t grow on trees, but paper does and it seems that when it comes to the impending stimulus funding, it seems we have one problem papering over another.
Leave alone for a moment the philosophical principal of the federal stimulus package that was signed into law this week; much like the decision to invade Iraq, or pass the last federal bailout package, like it or not, it is a done deed now, and we all have to deal with the consequences.
No, what is troubling about this particular bailout package is the disturbing lack of accompanying details.
If it were simply a matter of passing the bucks onto local governments to apply as they see fit, we might applaud the practice, but in this case, the buck has to wind its way through the state level and, in Maine’s case, our state government has shown a remarkable inclination to play fast and loose with the facts.
Remember that vote to force the state to pay 55 percent of total public education costs, including 100 percent special education costs? It hasn’t happened. Not even close.
Worse yet, a look inside the numbers shows how programs have been shifted around to actually shrink the bottom line in special education, which correspondingly makes the state’s contribution percentage appear to increase; but what was clearly the intention of the taxpayers hasn’t been addressed.
Of course Dirigo is a well-established fiasco and that hasn’t stopped us from throwing good money after bad.
When it comes to this stimulus package, we have a federal government, already trillions of dollars in debt, passing major cash infusion on to a state government that has no track record of playing straight up.
It’s enough to create room for doubt as to how effective a citizen veto of Gov. Baldacci’s prized school consolidation package next fall will actually be.
