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Hernando Today

Why Are We So Gullible?

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By John Herbert, From Where I Sit

Hernando Today

Published: January 14, 2009

Hernando County Commissioners recently approved a $12 million increase in our 2009 budget. There wasn't much debate, little more than a rubber stamp. The disturbing, if trivial, amount was justified as unspent but OK'd funds from last year.
"That's how we've always done it," explained the county's budget director, nudging this year's spending closer to the half-billion-dollar mark. Didn't we just have a national election themed "Change you can believe in?"
I just retired from a 40-year career in the corporate world where annual budget guidelines included this memorable bit of advice: "Use it or lose it."
If you want to keep spending on last year's projects, resubmit them as new budget requests at the proper time, which would have been last autumn at the board of commissioners.
This tiny slice of "business as usual" tells me that a theoretically promising tight-budget Brooksville has learned nothing from all of last year's hearings and other public debates on county spending.
It was also a frightening example that too many Americans, county commissioners included, can be too darned gullible – big time – for their own good.
Several other recent events have left me dangling (some readers may think that's a "very good thing," as professional snob Martha Stewart would say).
Like how Bernie Madoff could "Ponzi" Wall Street and almost get away with it? Like how Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) keeps winning re-elections even though he is widely seen as having leaned so hard on to ease up on mortgage terms at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that he is single-handedly probably the number-one cause of the nation's wading still deeper into financial do-do.
Even the adult movie industry is currently asking for a bailout. You'd think Congress, which adopted the laws, and legendary porn publisher Larry Flint should know by now that Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is a viable alternative to liquidation.
We're a nation where anything goes. Accused sexual deviant Larry Craig (R-ID) was just sworn in for another term as a U.S. senator. Federal tax "refunds" (aka "welfare bribes") are to be mailed to everyone, again, even though 40 percent of us don't pay any taxes.
Economic stimulus? I'm depositing my "welfare" check right into my savings account, as before, and as millions of other cost-conscious Americans are doing. Let's see a few longer-term financial incentives, instead.

American gullibilty is well-documented. Remember the California Gold Rush of 1849? Yes, many made fortunes through back-breaking work. But many more lost their shirts.
A one-cent newspaper hit the still relatively barren New York streets in 1833. Its history is documented in the recently-published "The Sun and the Moon," the Sun being the New York Sun, a tabloid which rapidly doubled the city's newspaper circulation from 20,000 to 40,000 a day. All the competition charged six pennies for a daily dose of printer's ink. The moon is, natch, that sparkling disc of mouldy cheese illuminating the nighttime sky.
The Sun's sensational initial circulation-builder was "news" of life on the moon allegedly sighted through the South African-based telescope of a famous English astronomer. His "spotting" of a society of almost-human winged lunar "man-bats" kept New Yorkers talking, if not scratching their heads, for at least three years.
The Sun's hoax was ultimately unmasked by a disgruntled editor, but not until 1840. By that time the moonscape included colorful poppy fields (the author was possibly hallucinating), a great lake, thick forests and skyscraping cities. Obviously, the intrusive world of instant telecommunications was still far away.
Now that it has arrived with a vengeance, telecommunications informs us in living color that there could be life-sustaining water on Mars. Minerals, too. With plenty of job vacancies for strong backs. And no taxes, yet. Now, if we could only figure out how to return safely back to earth from Mars. NASA has wisely delegated that solution to private space companies, so it may happen.
Life on Mars would provide for an easy solution to Hernando County's debilitating 11-percent unemployment rate.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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