Notes From the Floor

Bicycles on Highways

Pleeeeez Mr. Hammond and Mr. Governor, do you really think that all the people forced to ride bicycles because they can't afford or can't drive a car live in the North End? What do you think people in Middleton or Shoshone or Post Falls do when they don't have the money for gas or car repairs? Does it really help these people that you still propose to raise registration fees to as much as $120 after spending every penny of the stimulus you can, borrowing hundreds of millions through GARVEE and raising gas taxes to build more roads.

Mr. Governor your people talk about bike lanes like they are a luxury item. Have you ever tried to ride to work on a rural highway, especially one where the transportation department has eliminated bike lanes and further narrowed shoulders at your request. I grew up in Custer County and I am not talking about he North End of Boise, I am talking about trying to figure out how Idahoans get to work when they don't have a working car.

It might be OK if you'd dedicated some funding to making sure there was some bus or van or some public transit in every community, but you and people like Mike Moyle say public transit doesn't work. What do you mean? Doesn't work for you because you can't imagine leaving the comfort of your giant new pick up truck to ride a bus? What if you had no choice?

What choices to Idahoans have left? Walk, bike, hitch hike? What about kids in rural communities? They walk and bike along state highways everyday. Are bike paths a luxury for them? How many kids and adults in Idaho die on highways every year because they have no safe place to walk or ride? I  bet someone knows.

All for Roads and Roads for All

Headed into the Joint Finance Committee where arms have been twisted so the Governor can cut State Employee funding by 5%. Every dollar he can funnel into the world of concrete and asphalt is going there. As if the road construction industry's boom alone will revive the economy while we lay off state workers, make them take deep furloughs, cut teachers and teacher's aids, grow class sizes and weaken our ability as a state to serve people when they need it most. An economy needs small businesses and I'm wondering where we are working to help them. Little home energy efficiency companies, tech companies who scan documents and do data entry will boom, but not because Governor Otter wanted them to. The strings in the stimulus are accountability measures. Congress tried to make us prepare a bit to avert an energy crisis, be more efficient and independent finally as a nation in healthcare and energy. But this governor wants to tax us more for roads, borrow more for roads, spend all the stimulus he can on roads while his Superindendent of Public Instruction cuts deeper and deeper into Schools with every passing day.

Economic Quandaries

The Senate chamber is empty but for Senator Dick Sagness next to me
and the voice of secretaries in the back rooms. Outside, spring froze
and is again thawing.

It is Friday. The place emptied early.
JFAC this morning was about the economy. How can anything not be. Or
maybe for sanity we should all find something that is not. It is an
oppressive force in here but more so as people around the state try to
plan for next month or next year.

There is a danger in that
hesitancy to plan. If we are employed and so save our wages and pay off
debt, the businesses around us suffer. We don't go down to Jim's
appliances to replace the refrigerator that is turning the milk sour,
or decide to suffer with the clothes dryer that takes four hours to dry
a pair of jeans. We wait, not knowing if we will have a job to pay off
that credit card bill.

But in the long run, our savings, or more
critically our lack of credit card debt, makes our families more
stable. We pay less in interest and fees. This is very hard on Jim's
Appliances. But if it and other businesses do OK with the help of those
who are still spending, if the employed go to local shops where their
dollars circulate better in the local economy, then when the clouds
break a bit and we breathe again, less debt hanging over us, a bit of
saving to buy that refrigerator with, the economy will rise with all
that "pent up demand." We will all benefit as families across the
nation end all that "waiting as long as we possibly can to buy what we
really need to buy."

For those traditional economists who say we
need to personally borrow more so we can spend more now. I say that
will only perpetuate a problem at the root of our economic woes.
Americans are smarter than that. We recognize that we can't keep
running up personal debt at this rate and not fall off an edge some
day. The minimum wage can not stay as out of whack with the cost of
living as it has been.

Yes, millions are without jobs, hanging
on by that thread of little unemployment checks. They may be lucky to
pay for food and rent and doctor bills, and are not going to be the
ones buying new refrigerators or saving money. But roughly ninety
percent of American workers still have jobs. We will make this economy
suffer while we save and pay down debts, but when we are ready, this
revived middle class may again become a middle class that sets to work
to fill and even create new jobs in manufacturing, energy efficiency
and alternative power generation.

I sit at my desk in the empty
Senate and I know this is an economic quandary of epic magnitude. Who
will suffer and pay for the rearrangement of our economy? Will it be
families spurred simply to borrow more to buy more things? Or will it
be the box stores and restaurant chains we abandon for corner groceries
and little diners? The banks and mortgage brokers? Importers of foreign
made goods? The credit card companies? Someone will pay. Things will
change. If our determination is to hunker down and support the little
shops and growers and appliance stores right around us, then local
places may not be the ones to go under. We may see a trend away from
generic downtowns where the food and shopping is so nearly identical
that one might be in New York, LA, San Francisco, Boise or Chicago and
not even know it. We may see the rebirth of an era where cities have
character and people take pride in what local people make and sell.

That could happen. But it depends on what we do.

Regardless,
huge things are happening around us. Banks may go under. More stocks
could fall to nothing. But eventually we all do have to replace the hot
water heater, the furnace or the car. If we save or at least owe less,
we may feel we can do more than that. Maybe we will even save enough to
put dollars back into banks, some will start new businesses. The ground
will thaw. As a nation we have huge resources, huge ingenuity. Millions
work very hard and if we pay them enough to live on and ensure they
don't fall behind every time they need a doctor; if we take the weight
of providing health insurance off the shoulders of business and
families, we will endure. I'd place a bet even, that if we do these
things, pay off some personal debt, buy more locally, fix our health
care system, invest as a nation in manufacturing and energy, we will
thrive.

Crazy Highways

Here's what's crazy: By my best reckoning Idaho is getting over $15
million it could have spent on public transportation statewide. It can
only buy infrastructure with this money, nothing but buses, bus stops,
material stuff like that. No drivers, no gas, no operating costs to pay
drivers to make the buses go anywhere if we buy them.

At the same
time the Speaker of the House (I'm sure with a bit of strategic help
from Mike Moyle and his leadership team because Lawence Denny is the
man, but he is not the arm twisting type) the Speaker has said no
hearing on any local option authority legislation. No hearing to let
voters in local communities around the state decide if they would like
to tax themselves to fund something urgent that we as a state
legislature just won't give them money for.

The most glaring
example would be public transportation. No state dollars go there. No
local funding source exists because local governments are not allowed
to ask voters what they want to fund and how they want to fund it. The
state dictates that. So since Mike Moyle, a single man from Star,
elected to a powerful position by an increasingly conservative
Republican caucus, since he is still not a fan of public
transportation, the entire state has no way of funding public
transportation operations.

So, no matter how long the people of
Nampa wait in traffic, no matter how long it takes some days to get
from Boise to Star or Eagle, if we have no money to operate a bus with
fuel and a driver, we can not use the stimulus to solve the problem of
Nampa to Boise buses running at capacity, or a bus system so poor it
does not even run after dark, in early mornings or on weekends. Who can
depend on a system like that? Who can afford to miss the bus to work or
a job interview when the next one does not come for an hour or so?

So,
instead of using the stimulus to allow little cities around Idaho to
fund new van pools or real bus systems; instead of putting more buses
on that corridor between Ada and Canyon counties we will instead replace
old buses and then go on as we were, infinitely widening freeways and
overpasses between Nampa and Boise. We will spend billions on that
stretch of highway because a few powerful people don't personally like
or believe in public transit. We will waste millions infinitely and
futally trying to unclogg a clogged stretch of freeway, money that
could be spent to fix rural roads from Soda Springs to Sandpoint.

I would think my rural colleagues would be more annoyed about that.

Gifts and Promises

Last week the Potato Commission sent a box of potatoes to the House
and Senate for each of us. A Technical training center from Cassia
County gave us a beautiful laser- and
router-carved wooden paper weight with our names carved into the side
and an Idaho Quarter set in the top. At a lunch for the anniversary of
the Idaho National Lab we were given a thumb drive and sticky note
holder along with a mini nuclear waste barrel that functions as a
squishy stress reliever/forearm exerciser.

We
get gifts as legislators. I usually feel funny enough about them or the
expectation of a promise or vote that I give them away to interns or
statehouse staff. We did vote last week to pass a memorial commending
the Idaho National Lab on its anniversary. I voted for it because it
seemed to reflect the lab in a genuine rather than a wishful way. It
was a good memorial. I'd vote for it even if I'd not been offered the
nuclear waste barrel/stress reliever/forearm exerciser gift.

The
anniversary lunch where we got the Lab's gifts was a blur of slides and
very brief admirals and contractors speaking in front of a big back
curtain. Normally these folks at the INL focus public presentations on
the great promise of Nuclear Power and their mission to build the next
generation of nuclear power plants. Anymore they seem to go to great
lengths to avoid talking about all the radioactive waste buried and
stored out there in the desert of South Eastern Idaho.

But at
lunch, in celebrating that nuclear reactor technology was first tested
and developed here in Idaho, celebrating our role in nuclear weapons
production and nuclear waste storage, the lab did focus on waste and on
the thousands of people who have labored for decades under often
dangerous conditions to try and clean up what is one of the largest
nuclear waste dumps in the nation.

I've met many people who
worked out there at "the site" over the years. Most recently a fire
fighter who I worry about after having heard what he has breathed and
how he no longer fears that odd feeling of heat and gamma rays
radiating off of spent fuel and high level waste.

I will be a
big proponent of nuclear power when we do finally solve the issue of
waste. We will need to figure out how to neutralize it, not just
recycle part of it. We can't keep leaving the most highly radioactive
remains to burn somewhere in a mountain or building or pool of water
for decades, centuries or millennia. I hope our government continues to
invest money in solving the puzzle of how to render radioactive
materials harmless. I even hope our lab gets that job and does it well.

But
to talk of building new nuclear power plants before that task is done
is beyond my comprehension. To talk about how this energy is clean or
carbon free when in truth it is mined, refined, processed, transported,
reprocessed, stored, cooled, monitored, repackaged and labored-over
using decades of fossil fuels, that makes no sense. We still have no
idea what to do besides piling more radioactive waste next to every
nuclear power plant we build in every city or town from New York to
California. To revive the industry means billion in profits for a few
and a gift of consequences for the rest of us.

Nuclear waste is a
gift our state still keeps getting. Most Idahoans don't know it but the
nuclear navy's nuclear submarines still send all their radioactive
"spent fuel" waste here to Idaho. Dangerous materials so radioactively
hot that they are literally deadly to behold. Three Mile Island has
waste buried out there in the soil over our aquifer. Decades of taking
other state's nuclear weapons waste have left the soil so hot in places
that even now it catches on fire sometimes. Workers in big tents use
robots and cranes to dig it up out of the soil and put it in barrels to
become New Mexico's problem.

If we want more gifts, we will
believe the industry when they promise us it is a clean and safe form
of energy now. They say they have solved the issue of the waste by
recycling part of it. But ask them where it all goes. All of it. Ask
what precisely we are left with afterward and is this something Idaho
wants or is it something we're hoping someday to pass guiltily on to
some other state or community with our own hollow promises and wishful
thinking.

That's another gift I will decline. I will leave that
one, like I left the mini squishy stress reliever/nuclear waste barrel
on the INL luncheon table.

Beer and Wine

When we get a phone call from a constituent to the Legislative information desk, someone sends us a little yellow piece of paper with the brief massage typed out and a return address where we can call or write back. Last week the yellow phone call slips started flowing, a constant stream of "Don't tax my beer and wine" messages rippling out from the alcohol distributors, to the bars and restaurants to the patrons, riled like colonists at a tea party.

I understand. No one likes to pay more for anything, especially in hard economic times. But I ask, would we rather pay more through some other part of state government to build more prisons, pay for more emergency care from car accidents, more child protection and domestic violence shelters — all because we do not offer nearly the treatment we should to prevent or end alcoholism and substance abuse in the state of Idaho?

I promise we will all just pay more if we don't someday create a dedicated funding source for treatment. And I'm talking about treatment, not about advertising or bill boards here. We will all watch people in our communities suffer year after year because we didn't help this year, because we didn't see the larger issue here.

I don't like the temperance argument. Moderation is what most people use in their approach to beer and wine. But if those of us who do drink beer and wine are not asked to pay for treatment, then who should pay? If we could tax Meth, believe me, we as a legislature would. We can't. Not Meth or Heroin or Cocaine or any of it. But when someone's family member is addicted and they can not afford an expensive treatment center, where will they go? Who will pay?

Let me say this, I don't know about you, but I would have paid. I would have stepped up and shelled out the seven cents a glass of wine or bottle of beer, and I would have paid so that finally the state of Idaho has a chance to fund real drug treatment as we never have before.

But here on the afternoon of this cloudy spring day, when the Senate floor is subdued and people file in and out on their way to and from committees, it is too late. The beer and wine tax went down, five to thirteen in the House Revenue and Taxation Committee this morning.

Risch and Crapo and Debt

Senator Jim Risch is speaking to us now about his experience in Washington DC. He is spending a very long time talking about his seniority. I suspect after so long in the executive branch here in Idaho, he is less accustomed to being somewhere near the bottom of a pecking order. His words suggest some tension with his more senior Senator Mike Crapo with whom he says votes on every bill and amendment.

Risch and Crapo both in speaking to this body, sternly remind us that the current borrowing is mortgaging our childrens' future and sending American dollars to China. Senator Crapo certainly has done a bit of that borrowing in his ten years in the Senate… let's say ten trillion in borrowing? But according to Senator Risch, this borrowing is different because a Democratic President is borrowing to help people afford health care, to make us less reliant on high cost oil and to keep states from raising taxes and or going bankrupt.

The real irony is in Risch's statement about how freeing up credit will fix our economic crisis.

Is not our problem in part that families and small businesses are too deep in debt already? Wages are so low and the cost of fuel, housing, daycare and insurance so high that people can not meet basic needs with out borrowing to fix the broken refrigerator, the car or to buy groceries or pay a doctor bill.

More lending good Senators? To really fix our economy, I think we have more fundamental issues to address.

Food on a Table

Sometimes a day unravels. Sometimes it just starts with a conversation you can not believe your committee is having. Fifty thousand Idahoans unemployed. A nation trying to keep states from going bankrupt. Laying off state employees. Hundreds of businesses folding up and blowing away.

I remember how former legislator and Joint Finance Committee member, Margaret Henbest looked in here in the statehouse hallways sometimes. It was a warning to anyone asking anything of her. I used to think she was just a bit high strung and should chill out a bit. I feel that look in myself somewhere now on days like this.

People's lives are affected by our actions so clearly in years like this. What we fund and what we cut. Who loses a job. What business closes because no one can afford to buy what they sell. There is weight to this year that is unusual. More gravity and uncertainty. What we thought could be a short session, may lengthen as forces between the Governor's office and Republican leadership debate whether and what of the stimulus to take. Their delay helps no one.

These dollars are dollars paid to and to be owed by Idahoans to the Federal Government, regardless whether we send the whole check back to Washington. Some of the money headed our way may not rescue us from ressession but will keep states like ours from raising taxes for roads or to keep schools open next year. Some will help insulate us from further crisis. It is not the recovery package I would have crafted but it is the one we have in front of us. The indecision and posturing does not help one single business stay open or one single family put food on the table.

State Employee Pay Cuts

It is not yet six am. I am dressed and ready to head to the Statehouse.
Yesterday we were told the early morning Joint Finance Committee
meetings will start. We will have a pre meeting to work out "motions"
or proposals for how much money we decide we will really have to spend
for state government in the last half of 2009 and the start of 2010.
That's medical care, prisons, drug treatment and water quality
protection and especially thousands and thousands of people who's job
it is to do this work of the state, from teaching our kids to guarding
our prisons, safeguarding social security numbers to making sure that
feed lots don't contaminate well water.

In a tiny room that is now a library but once was part of the county
jail, we will debate how deeply and in what way to cut state employee
pay. It is that bad.

Will we use furloughs (days off without pay) or base cuts as deep as 5%
or 7% in state employee pay? Some like governor Otter want to lay off
employees. I personally do not believe that is good for the economy or
for how well our state functions. This is the most Republican state in
the nation, the last problem we have is too many government workers or
people paid too well. Every new Republican governor finds places to
"reduce government." They eliminate departments, cut staff, rearrange
things. We are bare bones and state employees, especially those on the
front lines, the kindergarten and math teachers, the adjunct
professors, food stamp screeners, child protection workers and budget
analysts work hard for the pay they get. This won't be easy.

If we cut jobs, unemployment rises more than its current record rate.
If we pay families less, some will qualify for food stamps. They have
to eat and pay rent and child care and heat and gas and electricity.
Hopefully we will give some of them with families food stamps. Those
are federal funds we have been stingy with. Our state's laws are
different from any other state's. We make people lose everything before
we make sure they are able to eat. Its called an "asset test." You
can't own anything, just one car, not two, if you or your kids are
hungry and need help for a bit. That may be something we can change. I
know we need to.

How will our economy recover if families and businesses have to hit the
very bottom of crisis before they get help? The deeper they go into
crisis, the harder to recover.

Idahoans are rugged and independent. We also, especially in the small
towns and older neighborhoods know each other. We need to know each
other even in the suburbs. We need to watch out for our neighbors, make
sure they are OK. I have something to give still. I'm buying things at
locally owned stores and giving to the food bank and homeless shelter.
I know i could do more. It is that kind of time. Over fences and in
coffee shops, in senior centers and school yards, I think we better ask
how it is going. Maybe over a conversation we can help each other out
just a little bit and get through this.

Meanwhile, I have to head to the statehouse to vote on how to cut pay
for thousands of Idahoans. Not a vote I want to make. There are better
and worse ways to do this. May we do the least harm possible.

Deck Chairs

When the great boat was going down and an iceberg was ripping a hole
in its new metal skin, I imagine those deck chairs, the ones that would
have been wooden and heavy. Or perhaps there were none there on the
deck of the Titanic because this was the North Atlantic and there was
ice in the water and surely in the air.

In Health & Welfare
Committee last week, we were visited by Blue Cross, one of our state's
two largest insurers, in fact it is now the one the state now contracts
with to provide insurance to most of Idaho's 17,000 or so state
employees.

Blue Cross went to great lengths to show that
spending more money on health care did not produce better quality
health care. It is a point I would have appreciated coming from them
had they bothered to mention how a health care system run by insurance
companies creates a level of unpredictability and complexity never seen
in the history of medicine world-wide.

Daily, the cost of
American health increases because we as a nation and state government
allow insurance companies to set their own rates. We let them decide
what gets covered and what does not. We let these companies control and
then change randomly who may treat whom and how much will be paid to
those who provide care, based on who they are providing it to and
whether that person is newly sick or has been sick with this same
condition for a long time.

Imagine being a doctor and trying to
figure out who and how much to bill for a colonoscopy. If the patient
has insurance you get paid X. If they do not it is more. If the
condition was pre-existing the insurance company might not pay, so you
bill and work to get payment from the patient. Not only do you have to
know the rules for every insurer, but you have to know that the rules
can change at any time. So you may suddenly be designated as an
out-of-network doctor or the procedure may no longer be covered so the
company won't pay you and your patient, not knowing this, doesn't have
the money to pay, so you don't get paid at all. Maybe, just maybe if
you fight the insurance company you can get payment for the
colonoscopy, or, if you use a different code on the paperwork, you will
avoid the fight. In any case, before each procedure you need to make
sure that the company will let you do what your patient needs. They may
decide to pay for a lesser procedure or to make you wait until the
problem is more severe, or until the person has moved to someone else's
health plan.

Clearly you would never have time to see patients
if you had to do all this yourself, so you hire one or two people to
help with the paperwork. That is part of what makes what your
colonoscopy (and your patient's insurance) cost more because not only
do you have more staff to deal with the complexity, but all the
insurance companies hire more staff to manage the complexity too.

So the Titanic screams ahead.

In
the Senate Commerce Committee this week, Bill Deal, Director of the
Department of Insurance, brought a rule, which is kind of like a law,
to limit "discretionary clauses" in insurance plans. It is a modest
change that means more than you might think. Read your policy sometime,
if you have one (and I understand that one out of four of you have no
insurance policy.) You will find statements something like this:

We agree to cover these things, but at our discretion we actually might not.

We promise to pay for this, but at our discretion we might choose not to.

We will cover medical care that costs this much unless, at our discretion, we decide we won't.

Bill's
rule says you can't do this, at least not to ordinary people with
individual plans who have no way to negotiate those bombs out of their
policies. Small businesses beware you still have discretionary clauses
in your policies.

The rule is progress. It is one deck chair a few feet to the left as the metal tears and the ship pitches starboard.

Like
many, I've been spending a lot of time assessing what made our economy
collapse. You can look back at reasons why wages are low and why still
American companies could not survive manufacturing anything in the U.S.
The cost of health care is clearly a factor.  U.S. companies have to
pay for it while companies from countries with national health plans do
not. It still weighs heavily on businesses trying to hang on while, all
around them, businesses close and people lose incomes, buying slows and
the chill sets in.

The icy waters froth and lap. Brilliant blue ice glows in darkness.

I
plan this year to propose a bill to make companies tell small
businesses the details of their health plans BEFORE the business signs
on the dotted line. It says the insurance company can not change the
plan in the middle of the contract.

Wooden legs scrape on a painted metal deck.

I
look to President Obama to do this one thing for American business.
Simplify this mess. Make it so no American family ever goes bankrupt or
into deep debt to pay for needed medical care, ever again.

The Economy

I'm told I've been mighty accurate in my estimations of the economy over the last five years
I've served on tax and economic outlook committees in the Idaho legislature. These days we are doing a lot of urgent predicting. Predicting a volatile economy though is
not the sort of thing that lends itself to strict formulas. In my
humble opinion, the world is too complex for formula economics. That, I
think, is why a lot of economists sound sort of odd right now, like
they are describing a different world than the one we all live in. I
think many are having trouble fitting all the factors into one
calculator.

I might put it this way: we have created a hollow economy, one built on
fiction, on money none of us have, money that is promised against debt
large enough to consume more wages than we may ever earn in a life
time. And that is just the personal debt. Medical expenses, balloon
mortgages, loans for new more fuel efficient
cars, home equity loans, and everything from groceries to nick knacks
stacking up on credit cards. The average person owes more than $10,000
in personal debt. That's the average. That means most Americans own
nothing, or that someone else owns most or all of what we live in, eat
off of or sleep on. It is a disturbing thought. Who owns it and can
they take it back?

As a nation we have waged two wars on trillions borrowed from other
nations. Dollars that a President and previous Congress pretended we
had to spend.

We have allowed American companies to manufacture everything elsewhere
or to sell us nothing but goods entirely made by other countries. Our
dollars flow out to buy little plastic plug-in fans that make rooms
smell like lilacs, accent tables and CD holders made for pennies by
children using whole forests of foreign trees. We pay dollars and
companies owned by shareholders on several continents earn the rest.
Our wages flow out of our communities for insurance premiums and every daily necessity, staying only in tiny portions for the
hamburger flipper, the bus driver, the nurse, the teacher, the shop
keeper. Local stores are shuttered and dark and their owners who once
slaved for a decent wage, work now for people they don't know and will
never meet, in a chain store selling goods from far, far away.

Our factories still stand there, and people who know how to run them
are still alive because much of this has happened in the past eight
years. We could fix this. Not by outlawing or taxing foreign imports
but by recreating a sense of pride in what we make and a sense that our
very survival depends on our buying what our communities produce.

Even our food now finds us from far, far away. We may grow carrots and
produce milk or beans or flour, but it leaves the state so we can buy
someone else's, paying then the cost of packaging, shipping, cooling
and storing it all when we really don't need to.

We have grown soft and dependent because it was profitable for Texas to
watch oil prices scrape the stratosphere now and then. Alternative
energy research has been underfunded by Washington or bought wholesale
by Mobil and Shell. We were allowed to become dependent on oil made by
other countries which long have known exactly how to gouge us just long
enough to start and then quell revolutions in fuel efficiency and
electric vehicles. We all know oil prices will again be at $4 a gallon,
but, by design, we don't know when.

And then there is how we let banks play dice with debt. With bad debt.
How we let a loan become a Las Vegas game worth 50 times anything
material that was ever attached to it. We let insurance companies and
investment firms pretend that one dollar was worth $50 and created
fifty trillion in fake value or "derivatives" that inflated everything
like a giant stay-puff marsh-mellow.

You know how a marsh-mellow turns into a weightless crisp black shell when it hits a flame?

Well, our economy is a crisp black shell and we are all sitting on the
surface of it. This is just my opinion, but I think we'd better start
filling it with something, making something to fill it with. We can, as
a nation. Not that long ago we did. And whatever we make will form a
lattice-like scaffold inside the burnt shell and the dollars we spend
to buy the things we make will be like the bricks that turn that
lattice scaffold into a solid place.

We can't wait for government help to come because there isn't quite
enough real money in the world economy to bring back the whole sticky
stay-puff that was our economy.

Things will get worse before they get better. And the stimulus will
keep state governments from raising taxes and may help us prepare to be
a bit more independent. But more important than that is that we have
the ability, each of us, to choose to buy what we make. And those of us
who are still doing OK can maybe think about what we can make that we
or someone else made in our communities, one time, not so long ago.

And then we'd better start making that thing like our lives depended on it.

From the Field

For many days we heard that the proposed cuts to public schools budgets were going to mean cuts to number of teachers across the state. Fewer teachers for already over-full classrooms, jobs lost, kids sitting in desks, raising their hands, teachers running from one to the other, hoping to get to them all.

Each day in the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee (know as JFAC, the budget writing committee) a different part of state government stands before us to tell us what they do with your tax dollars. They describe how many employees they have, which Idahoans they serve and under what conditions. They tell us if cost are increasing or needs are. They answer our questions, which are sometimes pointed. Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Moderates, all probing to find out if there is money sloshing around in this part of the budget, hunting for funds that might be used for something else or asking leading questions to help the presenters convince the committee that the budget is appropriate or even that the cuts the Governor has proposed will hurt real people or cause us more costs in the long run.

The Superintendent of Public Instruction was in the committee yesterday. He is in charge of representing the hundred and something public school districts, all the teachers in their classrooms in the snow of the mountains or the dry flats of the desert a long days drive from the capitol here.

I'm glad to say he must have heard the groan of parents, the long sighs of kids at desks, the frustration of principals — because, though he proposed many cuts, those cuts were not to the number of teachers given to Idaho public schools.

Let me just say one more time, Idaho already has some of the largest class sizes in the nation. I have taught kids from kindergarten to college age, and, in public school classrooms, from sixth to tenth grade. I can't speak for all teachers in this, but I do want to explain something.

You can put me out in a field with my 20 or so students. Out there in the weeds, with little physical support, it is not ideal, but for awhile I'm just fine. I can still teach and, with pencils and paper and a spot in the shade, my kids will learn just fine. However, leave me in that high-tech classroom with every possible book, every bit of technology and other amenity and then double my class sizes, and it is much, much harder, much slower and more frustrating for me and especiallyy for the kids. Given a choice, I'd give up all the technology and choose the smaller class, teaching them out there in the weeds of the field.