William Larsen

Federal Budget

My wife got up this morning to shop with her sisters early on Black Friday. I woke at about 5:45 am and thought, about going out to staples and seeing if I could get a portable hard drive, I could use, but really did not need. They open at 6 am and so I went back to bed. At 9:15 am I thought, hey they had a 256 DVD/CD case for just under $9. Maybe, just maybe they had lots of these and they were not the hot item. At 9:45 am I was at Staples and in the unlikely event they still had the portable hard drive I asked. Yes, they had the mini portable hard drive. In fact they had a lot. They even had a lot of the DVD case I was after as well as a large digital picture frame.

My prediction this year is that sales are going to be down. My wife said the stores were not full like they were last year and it was there were many of the hot items still on the shelves. The devaluation of the dollar is causing some real problems. The Federal Government must very quickly get the budget under control. It needs to act like any family does when laid off, cut back!

The Federal Government is not the only ones who need to cut back. The recent proposal to increase the mayor's salary by $10,000 is also a bad idea. The reason for the proposal: entice better qualified people to run. This is baloney. No one I know ran for mayor because of the salary. They ran out of spirit, heart and because they were driven to do so by some personal conviction. The city needs to hold spending including salaries at the current level. The reason is pretty simple; government wages and benefits should increase no faster than the private sector in this community. We should not be comparing wage and benefit structures of other communities and structuring ours after theirs.

posted by William Larsen @ 11:25 AM