Meh Morning Wooten

Meh. Feels phoned in.

Drop Sonny a note and thank him for managing the small cuts that keep Georgia from being California, where budget “solutions” are mostly just gimmicks that hide the problem and roll it over into another year. Thank goodness for a constitutional prohibition on deficit spending - and for a governor who started managing the nickels early in the downturn. The gimmee crowd - the teachers’ union, for example - really should shut up. It could be far worse.

Following your constitutionally mandated role makes you a hero? Pretty low threshold for the "so called conservatives" these days. Having said that, as a former state worker who suffered through furloughs and frozen pay while the teachers were never furloughed and received regular pay increases, I'm having a hard time getting worked up over their "plight".

Fifteen Georgia counties have unemployment rates above 13 percent. State financial incentives for businesses to locate here should be limited to those with high unemployment caused by plant closings. Once skilled and disciplined workers leave to find jobs in metro Atlanta or elsewhere, they’re not going back, worsening those counties’ predicament. Kelly McCutcheon, executive VP of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, notes that “hundreds of scholarly studies and decades of real-world experience reveal no clear benefits in state tax incentives” and are “particularly questionable” in a business-friendly state like Georgia. Use them sparingly. And target ‘em.

And in a few years when a company has drained all the tax juice out of that poor county, they will move along, trailing yet another wake of unemployment. GPPG is right. Just don't do it.

Georgia is among 17 states with the lowest graduation rates, according to an advocacy group. Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be in schools with low graduation rates. Blacks and Hispanics are also more likely to be born without a married mother and father in the home. There is a correlation. It’s not the schools’ fault. We can’t fix education’s problems until we fix the family - or as an inadequate alternative, change the school model.

Wooten 101: Marriage and school choice solves all social ills.

Once again the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services wasn’t omnipotent in preventing the death of a child, which authorities say occurred at the hands of the mother’s boyfriend. It doesn’t take a village; social workers won’t always render perfect judgment. It’s the mother and father thing, again. Government can’t raise healthy children or protect them.

Once again, marriage solves all social ills, including child abuse. It just makes you pine for the glory days when real life was just like "Leave It To Beaver".

The rest is the usual "Democrats want us all killed / Republicans are trying to save us all (but only Palin Republicans)". I've had all I can take.

Selah.