{"id":366,"date":"2008-12-17T00:02:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T04:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2008\/12\/17\/a-budget-is-how-we-tell-our-story-and-this-story-is-hard-times\/"},"modified":"2008-12-17T00:02:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T04:02:00","slug":"a-budget-is-how-we-tell-our-story-and-this-story-is-hard-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2008\/12\/17\/a-budget-is-how-we-tell-our-story-and-this-story-is-hard-times\/","title":{"rendered":"A budget is how we tell our story &#8211; and this story is Hard Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>State budgets are massive, boring things &#8212; numbers and line-items and political jargon that make even the most tenacious citizen recoil.<\/p>\n<p>But <a href=\"http:\/\/www.northcountrypublicradio.org\/pdfs\/BriefingBook.pdf\">all that fine print released by Governor Paterson on Tuesday<\/a> is how modern societies set their priorities and articulate their goals. <\/p>\n<p>Schools?  Hospitals?  Food for the poor?  Investment in roads and bridges?  In many ways, our spending is more definitive than our laws.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, the story Paterson is telling is one of austerity and retrenchment.  &#8220;This is the worst fiscal downturn in our economy,&#8221; he declared yesterday, &#8220;since the Great Depression.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Do we have the guts and the creativity to weather hard times?  If so, how?  <\/p>\n<p>Will it be the old game of Winners and Losers?  Or will Governor David Paterson find a way to weave everyone&#8217;s narratives into that big, bad budget?<\/p>\n<p>My sense right now is that no one quite knows how to react.  There&#8217;s a deeply rooted desire to play the old &#8220;I want slightly more than my fair share&#8221; game.<\/p>\n<p>But all parties seem to grasp that the coffers are truly empty.<\/p>\n<p>Which means that something like statesmanship is called for as we teeter on the edge of something worse than recession.<\/p>\n<p>How will it all end?  No spoilers here.  We&#8217;ll all have to wait until the authors gather in Albany for a final rewrite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>State budgets are massive, boring things &#8212; numbers and line-items and political jargon that make [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}