The new Economy for Anytown, USA
Have you noticed the increasing number of advertisements, mail surveys, articles and events that are instigated by non profit groups? This trend seems to be the new model for growing an economy in nearly every town or city I travel to. I have the pleasure or displeasure, depending on how you look at it, of traveling to a different destination on a weekly basis. I’ve seen the long term outcome for these communities and it isn’t necessarily good for middle class families. Here is how the system works; first you need a few non profit (501c) groups to barrage the community with news that services are desperately needed to help the “cause of the day”. Typically, these 501c groups have a large number of hefty administrative salaries to support, so it’s pretty important to keep a steady flow of cash coming in. That’s where you the tax payer come in because they’ve found a way to tap directly into your State, county and local taxes. To sustain their growth they continue to barrage the community with panic and fear that a problem truly exists. It doesn’t take long for the people that want “free” services to find out that those services now exist in your home town. Presto! Now your community has a problem and more services will be needed to deal with the new influx of recipients that just seem to keep materializing from nowhere. Your community is now flooded with new citizens looking for “free” services and somehow the crime rate just sky rocketed. You have no choice but to increase your police and fire departments to protect the safety of the citizens. Of course we sprinkle a few “affordable” senior housing communities here and there so that we can get more services, give the criminals someone to prey on and give the police and fire department a steady flow of work. Our community isn’t quite complete yet. We have too many citizens with too much time on their hands because they can’t work and they’re just hanging around waiting for their services. We’ve provided them housing, exempted them from taxes, give them “free” services and food but we’re simply not entertaining them enough. That’s why you need a new community center and full service library. You also need a new police and fire department because they are dealing with too many problems and interacting with the “new” community members to the point where they need a larger “full service” facility, complete with weight room and trappings to meet all their needs without over exposing themselves to the community. We’re nearly complete now, with all the elected officials on board with the 501c economy and the citizens rallying to provide more help and relief to the community. With parents working multiple jobs our schools eventually adopt a Baccalaureate program so that the children are feeling so good about themselves that they don’t bog down their parents with home work or other such silly problems. We even employ our children and parents to volunteer to do the work that the 501c groups get paid to do but they can’t do because they are too busy administrating each other and giving themselves awards. What day wouldn’t be complete without reading about all the 501c activity in the eagerly supportive local news papers?
You’d think we’d be all set now. We have plenty of 501c groups, plenty of service recipients and enough working families to support the entire program but we still have a problem. It seems our more savory citizens, that have multiplied like ants to a picnic, have got themselves a little drug problem. It appears we just haven’t given them enough services so they had to resort to drugs and now they’re preying on the community to support their habit. What else is a community to do but bring a methadone clinic to town? What a perfect solution! Everyone’s happy now. The criminals are all in one spot, serviced, fed, and entertained. The middleclass families are too busy working two and three jobs trying to pay for it all and the 501c groups have secured their salaries for years to come. There’s just one problem that hasn’t been solved. How do we get the methadone patients, that are never late and never miss their methadone treatment, to show up for a job on time?
