Governator comes to town

Arnold Schwarznegger blew into town last week to let us all know that there are budget cuts coming to Cally-fornia. There emerged a rather amusing story of one of our city fathers at the meeting asking Arnold a question out of left field as to why he doesn’t support our right to own 50 caliber weaponry. Welcome to Redding Arnold! Anyway, the gist of the speech centered on a probable 10% cut to everything that the state funds. Sounds fair enough. Across the board. Everybody takes a hit.

Except.

Later that evening, after Arnold blew out again, we attended the Soup Supper of the local League of Women Voters. The speaker was Muffy Berryhill of the Shasta First 5 organization. This group is funded by the apparently never-declining cigarette tax. While they don’t fund pre-natal and early childhood programs directly, their purpose is to help organize and offer resources to those organizations in town that serve the very young. There is much more at their website: http://www.first5shasta.org/ She had some statistical data that was disturbing.
Child in Shasta County
There are 10,441 children in Shasta County (2006 data)
4,340 (40%) live in single parent homes versus 24% statewide.
33% live in poverty, as defined as annual income of $20K or less for a family of 4.

My personal view is that, after national defense, ordinary government serves no higher purpose than overseeing the care of the helpless. The mentally ill, indigent elderly, and very young children. Our state taxes-and-spends loads of money. We can cut budgets across the board. It sounds fair enough, but I wonder. When we cut the programs that serve children, and specifically brain development, won’t we pay dearly for that later, when they grow to become (hopefully) productive citizens? Is that a budget expense, or really an investment?

Right now, Muffy says that children in our county born testing positive for Meth is down to about 5 or 6 a month. I don’t find that hard to believe. Plus other drugs and alcohol, probably. So lets say 50-60 children a year. How is that okay under ANY circumstances in our civilization? We pay now or we pay later.

Amazing Medical Services in Redding

My knee is sore, so my doc sent me over to MD Imaging for an MRI. It really hits home how well equipped the Redding area is in terms of Medical Services. It’s a very well run operation. Laying on my back, inside this giant loud donut, emitting a really powerful magnetic field, it’s easy to imagine that the iron in your blood lining up in a pattern like iron filings clinging to a magnet. The want to know if you have any metal plates, pins, or metal slivers in you. One can imagine metal particles bursting out of your body and attaching to the magnetic donut. It makes you think hard, laying there completely still, like they ask. I used to do some hobby welding, and there was much metal involved, not always where you expected it. However, I emerged from the donut, none the worse for wear, so apparently I’m non-ferrous throughout.
Mercy in Redding
For a small town we have world-class medical services. In the lobby of MD Imaging, they have a display with medical tools of the trade from years gone by. Scary stuff! it makes you appreciate our current high level of technology all the more. Or, will the giant magnetic donut be the scary display in some future medical office lobby? Anyway, if you simply must be in need of medical care, you can do much worse than my town, with our 2 hospitals and teeming professionals all over the place.

And then there were 3……..

Two Redding area Title and Escrow companies have shut their doors. Alliance Title closed shop statewide, and Chicago Title closed their Redding doors as well. Their respective escrows are being handled by one or another of the 3 remaining companies: Fidelity, First American, or Placer. Alliance Title in Redding Having 5 competing companies in our market was probably too many anyway, but less choice is never better for the consumer. All those admin and clerical worker folks are out of work now, including the woman I wrote about in my previous post, who fought back tears while helping me as her assistant had been laid off. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. I hope they can all be absorbed back into the local job market, but it must be very difficult for lots of good people. The Redding real estate market can be very cyclical, but I can’t remember losing title companies in the last downturn. Chicago Title in Redding