Real money

Thank dog it’s over for now. If I learned one thing in this endless debate, it’s that a trillion dollars must be a lot of money. I’m old enough that I still remember when a billion dollars was a lot of money. The late Senator Everett Dirkson famously said, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Now you’re not. Even a billion isn’t enough to get the country’s attention. A billion is the new million. Now, if you’re serious about being a Republican, you have to talk about a trillion.

Of course, I have no idea how much money a trillion dollars is. If you stacked hundred dollar bills on top of each other, would they reach the moon?

In our little town, even a thousand dollars is still a lot of money. The city has been up in our neighborhood the last few days repaving the street in front of our house. For three days, we’ve had heavy equipment rolling around, making enough noise to wake the dead and even me. Yesterday, I thought the backup beeper on the backhoe was my alarm clock and kept mashing the snooze button until I realized there wasn’t going to be any more snoozing. This was at six a.m., and I usually sleep to about nine. I keep late hours.

We’re really happy to see our tax dollars at work like this. Since we moved into the house twenty-seven years ago, there has been a gravel strip between our sidewalk and the road. Winters, the strip would turn to mud, and the next spring I’d have to bring in more gravel to build it back up. To get my motorcycle out of the garage, I had to roll it backwards down our steep driveway and cross the gravel strip and make that backwards turn to be facing the right direction in the road. It was always a little tense, and fairly often my foot would slip out from under me if I had to touch down in the gravel. Fortunately, I never fell. Now I can roll down backwards and play the game of trying to never put a foot down.

We were lucky to get this work done because the crew chief said there are hundreds of miles of roads in town that need repair, but there’s no money to keep up. Our street was seriously breaking up, but there are others in just as bad a shape, and even some which are still not paved at all. The money for the job came from federal EPA funds because we have enough dust and other particles in the air to be a health hazard, especially in winter when lots of people still burn wood to heat their homes. We hate wood burning and get hit especially hard by one stove from a house on the diagonal behind us, but for a lot of families, it’s burn free wood from a National Forest permit or freeze in the dark.

So a few thousand here and a few thousand there keeps a couple of crews busy doing badly needed road work. This is almost certainly a program that will be cut under the new budget. Republicans hate the EPA, and they don’t care about these small programs that keep people employed doing important work. Next year this time, half of those guys or more will be out of work, drawing unemployment and food stamps, and they’ll lose their health insurance.

Tough beans. We're the Republican Party, and it's not our problem.

A few thousand here, a few thousand there, pretty soon you’re talking real people thrown into financial distress and a big hit to the local economy. At least we got our road paved.