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Budget slugfest
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Posted on Dec 11 2000
The Issue: With major decline in revenue generation, there’s hardly anything left for basic needs.
Our View: Real leadership is tested to the hilt in the final disposition of our meager resources.
Legend has it of a family who lived grandly on its windfall largess. One day, its wealth is depleted and there was nothing left but three grains of rice in a container.
They made Pacific Soup and guarded each other against eating one of three grains of rice. When, by accident, a member of the family swallowed one of three grains of rice, the rest immediately pounded his back to near death until he coughed it out.
This is exactly where we are today, guarding viciously how our meager revenue collection would be disposed. How money is disposed is the very center of the current gridlock that perpetually send both chambers into joint conferences. They enter the room with spread sheet papers and still come out empty.
Ironically, there are lawmakers who open defy the debilitating effects of the deepening crisis. In other words, despite bad tidings of the CNMI’s inability to pay-off some $4 million in debts to health providers in Honolulu, some lawmakers still want to generously give overpaid public sector employees retroactive pay.
Despite a cut in the scholarship program, sending students here and abroad to fend for themselves, lawmakers have climbed their election year horses ready to offer the moon. The greater question are:
How can lawmakers reasonably sacrifice the health and education of our people just to look good in next year’s election? Isn’t it time that all lawmakers come to terms with the economic reality that has descended into families throughout these isles? Isn’t it appropriate too that this issue be reviewed with some sense of responsibility?
Families everywhere in these islands are victims of the economic hardship so imposed from within and without. It’s time that lawmakers ease-up on adolescent tendencies so they grow-up in how they view issues of importance, including their empty political carrot and stick approach just to return to office in January of 2002. Responsibility, anybody?
