New Haven Independent

And the “new math” is alive and well in Hamden Town Hall, where according to its current Mayor if the Public Works Department spent $130,000 in heating fuel this year and the department asked for $125,000 for next year the answer is to recommend $90,000.

Huh?

Maybe I missed something over the weekend. Did the price of heating oil suddenly drop? Is natural gas suddenly cheaper? Assuming some true wizardry at economizing how do you legitimately argue a budget decrease of 25% even as the price of fuel continues to go up?

In any other circumstance we would call it fraud. In municipal budgets we call it “creative accounting.”

It isn’t the first time an elected official has perpetrated a fraud on taxpayers. Take a look at every budget written by Presidents Reagan and Bush. They were frauds. Both presidents hacked away at social programs, tried to defund Amtrak and slice away at heating assistance for the poor and frail. And as they were trying to do this they tried to argue that cutting taxes would mean more tax revenue.

We’ll tax you less and that will mean we will get more. It never worked. It is a fraud promoted by conservatives that has never been proved valid. But it sounds good doesn’t it?

Which brings us to the three candidates running for president. Two are engaging in what amounts to a fraud perpetrated on all of us; the other is hopelessly blind to reality. Both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton want some form of nationalized health care. Each has his or her own plan but they are fundamentally the same. Mr. McCain doesn’t appear to want to do anything.

The problem with the Clinton and Obama health care proposals, whatever they wind up being is that neither individual has bothered to tell us how much it will cost and who is going to pay for it. Actually we know who will ultimately pay. You and me. Well, actually that is not quite right because most Americans want someone else to pay for everything….so how about if you pay for the health insurance and not me. Seriously though, no one wants to admit to the need to raise taxes and Congressmen would collectively rather be boiled in oil than admit to raising taxes…so… if we implement this new universal medical insurance plan how do we pay for it? More deficits? We already have over a trillion dollars of national debt, we’re running an annual budget deficit in the hundreds of billions of dollars and there is no end in sight.

If past action is any indicator of the future we’ll just pass the cost on to our kids. To me that makes both Obama and Clinton ‘frauds.” They propose the, “this is what we want to do” side without bothering to pass along the how we’re going to pay for it.

Now before you think I have gone over to the “dark side” (become a conservative) let me tell you that I truly believe we need some sort of nationalized healthcare system. The one we have is in shambles. As a nation we spend more per capita than any other place on the globe for our medical system and there are still hundreds of thousands of people who have no medical safety net at all. We need to fix this mess of a health care system but we need leaders to admit that there is no free lunch…or in this case free health care. There is a cost. It is a big one. But it is the moral and ethical path to go down. Now all we need is to find leaders with “chutzpah.”

Neither Clinton nor Obama have it.

But if they’re frauds let’s not forget Mr. McCain, who benefits from the best medical plan money can buy because he is in Congress. The rest of us? Ever increasing deductibles, and the same or less coverage for more money. I don’t know how we get to universal insurance but doing nothing is no answer at all.

Which brings us full circle back to Hamden. Hey Mayor, you can write a budget that has little to no basis in reality, like cutting funds for gas and heating oil based on pie-in-the-sky hoped for savings. But there is an easier way to save money: stop taking the $587.49 a month for undocumented “business travel” that you did for 10 months last fiscal year by moving money from one account to another. What made you think THAT was ethical?