When I hopped on a Greyhound bus for a three-day, 3,000 mile journey to Portland ten years ago, I left behind my hometown of Buffalo. There were a number of different reasons, some personal, some existential, some economic, some just cuz. But economic reasons were very high on the list. This latest story of WNY's economic woes from the AP sums them up pretty well:

Employees Bring Own Toilet Paper to Work

BUFFALO, N.Y. - It was BYOTP time in Buffalo: Bring Your Own Toilet Paper. A county budget crisis left the bathrooms in a municipal office building with empty soap dispensers, paperless paper towel holders and bare cardboard toilet paper rolls. Employees also complained the bathrooms weren't being cleaned.

"It's almost humorous, but it's disgusting," said Bob Fioretti, who has worked in Erie County's Rath Building for 21 years.

"When people got to bring their own toilet paper and soap to wash their hands, it's like working in another country, a bad country," he told WGRZ-TV. Fioretti said there was waste piling up in some of the toilets.

The Rath Building, for those who don't know, is the seat of Erie County government. So it's surreal indeed to read that story and then come across another story from WGRZ-TV about "excess spending" by the county.

I get really skeptical when I see news reports about "excess government spending." Like car crashes, five-alarm fires and Timmy down the well, government waste stories are easy emotional issues that play on taxpayer fears yet fail to provide any social or historical context or justification. I'm not saying there isn't waste or corruption in government—lawd mercy, no—but it's funny that the story blames "the union" for insisting on two drivers to a snow plow instead of just one (couldn't there be a safety issue involved?) and criticizes the library system for operating too many branches at a time that citizens are fighting to keep those services running.

According to library director Mike Mahaney, as cited in the story, the 52 branches of the Buffalo and Erie Country Library system comprise more branches per capita than any other library system in the country. Of course that wasn't the case when Buffalo and Erie County sported over a million residents twenty years ago. According to the AP report cited above, Buffalo has about 300,000 now, down from 650,000 fifty years ago. So there was a time when all those branches were justified by population. Given the public backlash against proposals to close library branches, perhaps that number is still justified.

Mind you, this is my perspective from 3,000 miles away. I really don't know what's going on there, so perhaps my perspective is distorted by hearing only stories like the above. Besides, here in Multnomah County, we have our own problems. The library system is well-protected (knock on wood) but the school system is in shambles. The principal of Katie's elementary school sent a letter to parents asking them to rank from a list of services they deem most important while noting that the least popular would fall to unavoidable budget cuts; among the services listed were twice weekly gym classes, reading programs, music classes and, of course, one hour classes in the library media center. (I forget what the fifth was.) I was glad that parents were given the opportunity to have a say in what was kept and what should go, but it still saddened me. Why should any of that shit get cut? Kids need music, they need to read, they need the structured play and physical exercise provided by gym. We shouldn't have to make these choices. (And, obviously, this is where I turn into a disgruntled taxpayer.)

Maybe all these money worries got something to do with the numbers flipping by here.

Wolfowitz?

So we can do to the world's poor what we have done to America's?

This is one reason why I stopped political cartooning. I mean, where do ya begin? I can only make so many "Michael Jackson as day care director" references before the analogy loses its punch.

UPDATE: Oh, those kwazy anarchists.