BuckeyeBlog

On the front page of this morning’s Columbus Dispatch is a story by Robert Vitale about the city’s plans to tap into their “Rainy Day Fund” to keep the budget balanced in this fiscal year. It’s ripe with some corny plays on words, but there were a couple points made that I found myself agreeing with. Via the Dispatch, the first few lines:

If Columbus’ rainy-day fund were an umbrella, it would be the twisted, frayed, inside-out kind you see stuffed into Downtown trash cans on a blustery day.

After seven stormy years, the fund set up to shield city government during economic downturns is nearly tapped out, having been called on repeatedly to spare Columbus residents — and decision makers — the fallout from deep spending cuts.

Essentially, Vitale’s article is a combination of hard news and opinion, making it painfully clear that a balanced budget that takes into account money from funds like the city’s emergency fund isn’t balanced at all. The same can be said on the federal level, where a balanced budget that took into account the temporary social security surplus wasn’t really balanced either. If Columbus continues on this path, when the puddle that’s left of the rainy day fund dries up (I couldn’t resist), the city’s budget will become seriously cloudy.

Tags: Columbus

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 7:51 am and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.