The Sac Rag

As with being told to vote (I can’t find where I talked about that), I’m not entirely sure how I feel about being told to try my hand at balancing the budget. I assume the Bee’s interactive feature was not done in cahoots with the powers that bee in the state house. But I was also asked by the Natomas School District to participate in an “interactive budget workshop” (tonight at 6pm at Inderkum High School) to collaborate with Assemblyman Dr. Richard Pan on balancing the state’s books. For some reason this just doesn’t sit right with me.

Sure, we voters bear some responsibility for the mess as many of the strings tying the hands of the legislators were put there by voters. But making sense of it is part of a politician’s job. They seek our input when we vote, so pretending that they are taking our input in the line items of the budget seems like a preemptive excuse for when the final result doesn’t please anyone. “Well, we certainly did solicit your input, but as you see there are as many budget solutions as there are Californians, so our options were limited, etc.” So when the actual budget consists of a bunch of backroom temporary and no permanent solutions, we won’t have anyone to blame but ourselves.

I know my feelings on these things are seldom relatable but there you have it. What do you think? Do you enjoy fiddling with the knobs? Do you think they actually care what we’d do if we called the shots?