Cops For Columbus--The Rest Of The Story

Barack Obama flew to Columbus, Ohio, today to celebrate the graduation of 25 new officers from their police academy. These men will have jobs for at least this year because of the stimulus package which will give Columbus one million dollars to pay their first year’s salary.
That was the big story on network radio this morning. Public Radio added the fact that Columbus remains in such bad shape that even with these new cops they will have fewer police officers next year than they have now. Attrition, layoffs, etc.
And, it added, no new academy classes are expected. So what did that million dollars actually buy Columbus? Take away the cost of flying Obama and his entire entourage to Ohio, and it’s just about a wash. That’s typical for presidential politics.
This morning’s story brings to mind an experience I had during the election year of 1964. That was the year Lyndon Johnson buried Barry Goldwater under the biggest presidential landslide in history. I like to think I contributed a tiny bit to that landslide.
I was the newbie that spring, working for the Diabetes and Arthritis Program of the US Public Health Service—my first step on the government ladder. Our program had shelf upon shelf of articles and pamphlets on these two diseases. Some were twenty and thirty years old. Or older.
Whenever someone wrote to us—or a Congressman forwarded a letter to us—asking for help with either of these two diseases, we loaded up an envelope with the most recent materials and fired it off to him. No one had taken the time to weed the obsolete materials so they just sat on the shelves gathering dust.
One day that spring we got a memo from on high. Our program—and probably every other program in the federal establishment—was ordered to go through our obsolete materials, throw them away, and send back an account of how much each item had originally cost.
It took me a few days to do this, but I dutifully cleared out the shelves and sent off the report. About a month later, there was a small headline in “The Washington Post” and several other papers. President Johnson was announcing that he had saved the American tax payers such and such million dollars by eliminating superfluous publications. I laughed a lot.
(No one bothered to factor in the cost of my time and the time of all the other program newbies in the entire federal government who spent the hours tossing and counting. Take that away and the savings would have been a lot smaller.)
About a year or two later as the “Great Society” was being alternatively stitched together and unraveled, the papers were full of another health program for the underprivileged that was funded by Congress to the tune of $100 million—serious money in the ‘60s.
How much of that $100 million did this new program actually receive? Two million. About enough to rent space, acquire desks and phones, and hire staff. The other 98 million was re-allocated by the White House to pay for the war in Vietnam.
(Supposedly re-allocating Congressionally appropriated money should require some input from Congress—but boys will be boys, as every president eventually proves.)
This was not unique during the Sixties. I suspect it was not unique before or after the Johnson administration. I just happened to be on hand for this one. So I listened to the story of Obama’s flight to Columbus with a strong sense of déjà vu.
Another way to put it is every time you hear something wonderful about what the stimulus package is doing, listen for that little Paul Harvey voice saying, “And now for the REST of the story.”