Friday, August 24, 2012

Modesto Bee editorialist stung by Reagan

n. a. (1970, July 22). Delayed reaction of budget cuts. The Modesto Bee, p. A12.

In this editorial The Modesto Bee warned against dire future consequences that could fall upon California like a biblical plague due to: wait for it...Reagan-led budget cuts!  That's right.  Future Californians could look forward to rampant ignorance, not due to bad pedagogies and educational philsophies, but rather as a direct result of the fact that in 1970 the eeeevil Ronald Reagan championed a budget that refused "cost of living raises" to the university professoriate (elementary and secondary school teachers, by the way, received raises).

Similarly, the roads of California were doomed to be littered with bodies like some post-apocalyptic Mad Max horrorscape, as the direct consequence of Darth Reagan's cutting of $1.4 million from the budget of a conspicuously unnamed, "long-standing improvement program for negligent drivers."  To bolster it's case, the Bee cited a report in the wholly-unpartisan-utterly-objective-and-disinterested L.A. Times that this short-sighted budget-hawkery:

...could result in about 35,000 negligent drivers remaining on the road this year who otherwise would have been removed...[I]n producing a budget cut, the public's interest in improving the safety of drivers on the state's crowded highways is damaged.
Update: 7/ 28/2013  -- It seems that many of the Modesto Bee issues heretofore available through Google News have disappeared.  I have tried to locate another digital copy of the original editorial, but have been unable to do so. 

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