Tom Kawczynski - Off the Record

Sometimes I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, where everything is upside down and nothing makes sense.

I firmly believe in the idea that solutions to issues should be local and that acting thusly would create not just smaller, but more efficient government.  While I think that can be the case, what I am learning bit by bit is that, in fact, the opposite is often true.  It shouldn't surprise me; it makes sense that corruption would be easier to create when everyone knows each other.

We often rant about the size and scope of the federal government, but I learned an amazing fact today.  Taken in sum, the local and state governments in our nation would dwarf the size of the feds in terms of both numbers employed and expenditure.

Take Allegheny County.  I know their budget was in the $770 million range.  Plus, the City of Pittsburgh, plus the municipalities, plus the authorities, plus the school districts.  Add all these up and you'd have several billion dollars, spread across numerous governments that we barely know and most often ignore.  That scares me.

I'm learning how it works and two things strike me.  One, it will be much harder to reform things locally than it would be to fix DC.  Two, it is more important than that, for as much as I care about the national issues, the process is broken in our own backyard.  Contracts and candidates.  Authorities you never hear about.  And no one even knows what to ask.

To take on the system, I think you might have to expose it all.  You would make many enemies and few friends, but you would have the respect of people who wanted to know what was real.  I hope there are enough who feel that way, like I do.

For now, I will have to leave this as abstract as possible because I cannot explain all the relationships, and I am trying to understand myself.  I can tell you one thing:  The Point will be a gamechanger.