The Social Engineering Problem in Montgomery County

This interesting commentary from the Taxpayer League; read and comment:


An interesting commentary I received passed on for your comments.

Marvin Weinman
Montgomery County Spending Mistakes - A Summary......

-------------For your commentary web pages......

Today we read in the Post that the school board is considering having more
students walk to school in order to reduce school bus fuel expenses. I found
the article especially interesting since just yesterday I saw that heavy, gas
guzzling, motorized trolley car driving once again endlessly around Bethesda -
with nobody in it - as usual. For me it symbolizes everything that is wrong with
Montgomery County's government - a government that has devoted itself to
wrong headed actions each year for the past decade and for which the
results of mismanagement are now apparent even to the dumbest voter.

With social worker Obama poised to take control of our broken federal
government and with him a plan for wreaking further damage on an economy
already teetering toward life support, it is appropriate to review some of the
many mistakes made by Montgomery County's social worker government
during the past decade.

The County is a suitable model for the things to come in an Obama
administration that will be devoted to slathering on ever more layers of social
engineering programs - programs designed to extirpate all of life's problems
in order to make Thomas Moore's Utopia a reality at long last. What Stalin
could not succeed in doing, Obama will succeed in doing - or so he thinks.

Here are the some of big mistakes made by the Councils and the Executives:

1. The belief that for every problem known to man there is a governmental
solution - it is just a matter of one more spending increase and one more
new government program and one more incremental tax increase. Now
the County has so many taxes of so many kinds, no one can pass an
exam asking for an enumeration of all of them - including no doubt the
Executive and the Council members.

2. The failure to understand that the housing boom was a bubble and that
the revenue increases it produced were unsustainable. Instead of doing the
right thing and reducing real estate tax rates, the government spent
every dime of the surging revenue inflows.

3. Piling up of pension and lifetime medical benefit obligations off the
County's balance sheet. Benefits that the County will never be able to
pay because at the state and federal level the same game has been
played. Therefore, in only a couple of decades it will be necessary
to double today's income tax rates to meet the obligations. The voters
are simply not going to go along with that. They will rebel and force
lawmakers at the federal, state and local levels to undo these
commitments.

4. Turning over control of wage and benefit decisions to the employee
unions. Even some staffing decisions are now in union control, such
as the use of volunteers in the libraries. Currently the unions are moving
to take over pension fund management - now that should be pretty (mordant
statement). In short the tail is now wagging the dog - the Executive and
the Council now are mere rubber stamps - the unions dictate the decisions
in a one sided process the County calls "negotiation."

5. The adamant refusal of the school system to put in place meaningful
curriculum reform for the every growing proportion of disadvantaged
students - for whom the classical curriculum is meaningless, useless,
boring and frustrating. The disadvantaged students today need social
skills and work preparation skills. They get neither in today's dysfunctional
school system. The dropout rate and the test score results for these
students speak for themselves. The school system has so little regard
for practical instruction that it does not even publish the results of its
tiny vocational program.

In short the County is the perfect model of a perfectly dysfunctional County
government. The only thing that keeps things from flying apart completely
is the penchant of businesses to keep hiring in this area - even though
doing so makes no sense. How can a youngster be expected to support
herself here on a starting salary of $39,000 a year? But if the job were
relocated to Southwest Virginia, West Virginia or Pennsylvania it would
be a very different story. I guess some of our business CEOs are no
smarter than our government officials.

Richard C. Kreutzberg, Chevy Chase