| The news of benevolent overlord Rick Michigan's second budget has been lurking all week behind the scenes. I'd hoped to get a better chance to look at the thing today, but it's been a horrendously busy day 'round these parts. But, it did include stuff that I think everyone mostly expected, with is a little more money for education that comes with strings attached. In normal times, with a normal political environment, the idea of state government dictating to local school districts and the universities how they are expected to spend the money given them would incite conservatives to riot. That is, after all, the very definition of Big Government planning. But, we don't really have real conservatives anymore. It's the Tea Party playing as dress-up conservatives and not really interested in government that works but in siphoning off public resources to make already-wealthy people more rich. What today is passed off as fiscal conservatism is a thoroughly bankrupt ideology. It's practitioners aren't really following a political philosophy into which they bought into after great thought. They're just doing stuff and calling it conservative because that's what they had to call it to get elected. |
