Balancing Act
It is a mistake to compare a government budget to a family or business budget which must be balanced in the short term.
Governments invest in the long term; Public education creates tax payers that don’t come online for twenty years yet we understand this investment pays off.
What is the annualized dollar benefit of preventing a neighborhood from burning to the ground when you don’t know which area was saved this year? But we all understand there is a cost benefit to keeping a fire department.
This is the reasoning behind any function properly handled collectively rather than by individual initiative.
These payoffs are diffused across society as a whole. The returns on education do not flow back as cash to education departments. The very real payoffs of social supports do not flow back into specific programs. What is the annualized dollar value of keeping a carcinogen out of a water supply? Do the benefits flow back as cash to the EPA? Describing Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” fundamentally misrepresents the scale at which government works.
This is my first post here and I am keeping it general. The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line was a NORAD initiative establishing a string of radar stations in the Canadian arctic. My father was an engineer with the Canadian Air Force and participated in this construction. I will be leaning hard on the “warning” part.
“Line” is also a nod to lines of text which I hope to string here. “Foggy” describes both dew and my life in the Pacific Northwest.
Thanks for reading!