When one lives among tax and spend liberals, one must understand that rational thinking about budgets is considered irrational

So, I'm watching the news about budget cuts in Shelby County. I'm listening to the County's CAO tell me that the budget has to be cut. Fair enough. I'm starting to get some hope for the tax and spend freaks who run the City of Memphis and the County of Shelby. Then the hope is dashed.

I've said, many times, that when one lives in a locale where government is the 2nd largest employer, you just know your tax rate is going to be stupid big and you're going to see a lot of wasteful government spending. Yup. Ask the folks who analyze tax burdens for every state and community in the US. They'll tell you that Tennessee, in general, and the Memphis area, in particular, are hotbeds of taxation ruination.

I love it when the Memphis Mayor surrounds himself with a whole pack of cronies making more than $100k per annum. I particularly like it when he appoints one of his favorites, a woman who is a former convict, to head the rape crisis center and the whole damned thing falls apart. Hey, we can blame the haters, right mister Mayor? Oh, and then there's the head of the library system who has no experience with libraries, and the head of the department that deals with wastewater who has no wastewater experience, and so on, and so on. And have you actually tried to get results by calling the Mayor's Action Center lately? Come to think of it, I think I'll submit "Mayor's Action Center" in the national "Oxymoron of the year" contest. Yet I don't hear any kind of groundswell of disgust from the citizens of Memphis. You get what you allow, my brothers and sisters.

I digress. Shelby County Government is so deep in the hole, fiscally, it looks like a Jules Verne tale. The county says it needs to cut something like $5 million for next fiscal year, which is like saying they need to cut a twig off of a giant redwood.

So, instead of saying, "maybe all of our official peeps shouldn't be driving county vehicles home", and there are a lot of them you're paying for gang, or "maybe we don't need so many people in administrative functions", or something that actually makes a modicum of sense, they're going to slice the Sheriff's Department. Well, excuse me, but the last I checked the Memphis area has a tad of a crime problem. It's not just inside the city limits. People get shot, stabbed, raped (get ready to wait a couple of days to get checked if you're a rape victim because the rape crisis center, which used to be a jewel, has seen a huge staff exodus because the city ran out everyone who didn't live in the city limits and now it doesn't have enough qualified nurses to do the sexual assault tests that are critical for conviction of rapists), carjacked, robbed, beaten, assaulted, and otherwise victimized in Shelby County every day.

So, starting in July, there will be fewer Shelby County Sheriff's Deputies on the streets. I feel safer knowing that the county's employees can drive safely home in their taxpayer-funded cars with their taxpayer-paid gasoline. And if they get into an accident, their taxpayer-paid insurance will take care of it. And they can take a year off with all of the sick time they accrue under the County's asinine and archaic sick leave plan (you're paying for the time off, by the way). And while they benefit from the largesse provided by county taxpayers, there will be fewer deputies to catch crooks and patrol roads and highways.

No problem. Tell me again why we elect these idiots? OK, idiot is the wrong word. It just seemed right. Pompous, dole-taking, bribe accepting, developer ass kissing, tax and spend us into a canyon assholes is what I should have said. My bad.

Shelby County gets what it votes for. It gets what it allows. It suffers from what it ignores. Tell you what. Instead of sending tea bags to Washington, how about we get more interested in what's going on around here and actually do our homework before voting for these idiots? Yeah, not going to happen. But what a nice dream. And then there's that 41% of people who are going to vote for somebody who looks like them no matter how crooked, stupid, inept, incompetent, or convicted somebody is. Isn't that the percentage of vote Mayor Willie got last time? I'm just sayin'.

Here's the deal. What if we file a federal court lawsuit and get the election system changed back to where the winner has to have 50.1%? Remember when that got thrown to the curb? That was right before Herenton beat Hackett. Ford Sr., led a charge for a change because he claimed, and probably rightly so at that time, that minorities were underrepresented here because there was little likelihood, with more than two candidates in the race, they could get a minority elected because the white guy (use of guy intentional for that time) would always win the runoff.

Well, now we live in a minority/majority city. That argument is passe. And it's the reason Herenton can play the race card and get elected any time he wants. I'm going to call it his 41% solution.

File suit. Throw it out. And we might actually get to elect people who understand you can't tax and spend your way out of anything. And tax and spend is why we're about to fire a bunch of deputies to try to cut a budget that's top heavy with waste and pork. Wake up, people.