Why Does Anthony Foxx Hate Teachers?
Can only assume that he does, or at least not like or appreciate them as much as, say, librarians or social service workers or veterans. While we’re at it, might as well add district attorneys, court clerks and sheriff deputies into the mix, as well.
How else to explain Foxx’s wholly irresponsible threat to veto any city budget that doesn’t include forking over $2 million to bail out Mecklenburg County and help keep libraries from shuttering their doors.
The same question applies to Edwin Peacock, a Republican councilmember who apparently fully backs the Democrat mayor’s misplaced largesse with city tax dollars.
Funding libraries, along with schools, parks, senior centers, and social services programs, is a county responsibility. Only the county well has run dry, after years of reckless spending by many of the same folks who are now begging for a bailout.
County Manager Harry Jones’s recommended budget includes about $81 million in cuts, and libraries bear a large brunt of the hit – about $15 million. Library officials already plan to close three branch locations and say they’ll need to close a dozen more, unless they receive a local stimulus package to the tune of $8-million: $5-million from the county, $2-million from the city, and a combined $1-million from local towns.
The prospect of libraries shuttered, teachers laid off en masse, parks emptied, jails overcrowded, and veterans shafted is a painful reality that needs to be addressed. Enabling the spending addicts who got us into this mess – the county board’s misguided, liberal majority – doesn’t do that. It slaps a Band-Aid on a pervasive and malignant tumor, serving only to prolong the pain and give the cancer additional time to grow.
There is absolutely no reason – none – not a single, demonstrable piece of evidence based on prior acts, to think that if Mecklenburg County receives a few million dollars to help save some libraries this year, we won’t find ourselves in the exact same situation next year. Not without a major change to the majority leadership of the county board.
So how’s this for a workable compromise: Roll with Foxx’s stone-crazy proposal and have the city toss the county a bag of loot to keep a few libraries open, deliverable upon the resignation of Beggar-in-Chief Jennifer Roberts and her at-large county board cohorts.
It’d be the best $2-million the city ever spent.
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