In a word, no. That doesn’t mean he was correct – he wasn’t. But it’s fair to contemplate how the actions of our government officials – and their stewardship of public money – affect our everyday lives.
Last week, while the Caughlin Fire(s) were still raging all over Reno, before a cause of the fire had even been determined, and while thousands of people had no idea if they’d have a kitchen to make Thanksgiving dinner in or not, Harry Reid just couldn’t resist the chance for cheap political snark on the floor of the Senate, saying,
“Mr. President, it is times such as this we understand what happens to local governments when they have to lay off people–firefighters, police officers. It has happened all over Nevada and all over this country.”
Making such a statement at such a time is insensitive and classless – even Harry Reid didn’t feel compelled to include that portion of his remarks on his website where he otherwise brags about mentioning the fire (although to be fair, it is in the video portion).
His implied allegation also happens to not be true in this case.
While Reno’s Station No. 7 along Skyline Boulevard was closed the night the Caughlin Fire started, Hernandez said that even if it had been open, the difference would have been minimal considering the high winds and rough terrain.
Station No. 7, less than three miles from Sierra Pine Drive, is in the area closest to where the blaze is believed to have started. The station’s been browned out since the spring of 2010 spring because of budget cuts.
“Given the location of the fire, the extreme wind conditions that we had and heavy fuel loads, irrespective of the station’s staffing, whether it was open or closed, it would not have had an impact on the overall outcome of this fire,” Hernandez said. “This fire quickly grew, it was an erratic fire…”
Cheap, classless, ill-timed, AND false! That’s our senior Senator!
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But timing and boorishness aside, it’s something worth debating and contemplating. After all, politics ultimately winds up being policy. (Bad politics just winds up being bad policy, as when emotion attempts to trump basic math.)
The meme that Conservatives hate all government and want to get rid of it entirely is, of course, false – all rational and/or honest people of any political stripe acknowledge this. What we are concerned about is a government which protects lives and liberty, and which is sustainable in the long term.
Having strong, competent, and effective local fire departments and police departments, as well as functioning sewers, roads, and bridges are all necessary prerequisites to living in a free and prosperous society.
But if we spend money we don’t have to have more of those things than we can afford, ultimately we could be left with nothing for all the debt we’ve incurred.
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A very good friend of mine very nearly lost his family home in the fire. He’s still evacuated, in fact, while various companies and agencies work around the clock to make it habitable again. Heroic firefighters saved his house, and I don’t use that word lightly.
Afterwards, he told me, “I don’t care what anyone says – those people deserve every dime they’re paid.”
I don’t necessarily disagree with this. But the truth is that what they may or may not “deserve” is in a lot of ways beside the point. The real question is what we as a society can afford.
Even Homer Simpson figured this out during his first few months in elective office. Which means Harry Reid is less smart than... D'oh!
If we pay our civil servants more than we have, the only option is to put their pay or benefits on the taxpayer’s credit card, and that’s exactly what we do today. In spite of the state Constitutional prohibition on deficit spending, we’re carrying around $11 Billion in future debt in just public employee retirement benefits. Just for some perspective, that’s roughly what the state of Nevada spends in three years to do everything our state government does. And the pension deficit is up a billion bucks from just last year, when it was a billion dollars higher than it had been a year before. It doesn’t take a mathematician to see where that trend leads.
At some point, that bill will come due, and then we’ll have two options as a state, since we can’t print our own currency. Either we can simply renege on that promise to those civil servants and just not pay ’em, leaving tens of thousands of aging and essentially unemployable folks out in the streets, or we have to slash current services beyond what we already face to pay out what’s owed. And as tawdry as Reid’s comments may have been, he’s not wrong to suggest that if you cut too deep in terms of public safety spending, people may in fact be much, much less safe.
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So even pretending Reid’s premise had been correct, and that budget cuts had made the devastation of the fire worse that it would have been otherwise, it’s worth looking back a few more steps than just the budget cuts. We need to ask what necessitated those cuts in the first place.
And more importantly, we need to ask what we can do to avoid even more drastic cuts in the future. We can start by putting away the credit card, paying our bills as we go, and living within our community’s means.
