Conservative Kansans Learn Maybe the Federal Government Does Create Jobs and Provide Benefits After All

Or Maybe They Just Don’t Care About Air Travel Safety

Conservative are fond of trumpeting the idea that government never ever created a single job.  This is patently false of course, in fact many of the people spouting such nonsense are government paid employees, like Conservative legislators.  But it is fun to believe such stuff, because it builds up the fantasy of self-reliance in a complex modern society.

Now people in rural Kansas are finding out that cuts in the Federal budget are cuts in the Federal budget.

The cuts came into clearer focus Thursday. Garden City Regional Airport would lose its air traffic controllers, saving the federal government $318,756 and leaving pilots to handle landings, takeoffs and weather conditions mostly by themselves.

“Oh,” said Dave Unruh, a retired farmer who heard the news as he waited for a flight to Dallas. “Is that part of the deal?”

Well yes Dave, it is.  And despite the fact that the local Congressman led the way to get these cuts, local officials, the ones that unlike the local Congressman actually have to live with the cuts are not happy.

Mayor David Crase and airport director Rachelle Powell spent last week writing letters to Huelskamp and other elected officials urging them to save Garden City’s tower, one of 238 at relatively small airports across the country set to close beginning April 1. Crase said the closure would “undo years of investments” at the local, state and federal level. Powell warned of a decline in flights and associated revenue from fuel or fees or dinners at the popular restaurant Napoli’s at the Flight Deck. Though it was too soon to know, she worried that American Eagle might curtail the only regional jet service in and out of southwestern Kansas — a constellation of gridded towns that dissolve into farm fields and ranches and some of the largest meatpacking plants in the world.

But the rest of the Conservative world sees this as a breakthrough in government spending.  Look for them to use the Garden City Kansas model for the rest of the country, and to eliminate air traffic controllers in major airports like LaGuardia, O’Hare and Hartsfield in Atlanta.  If pilots can do their own landing in Garden City, why not in Chicago, New York and Atlanta?

Oh, but don’t look for any cuts at Washington National Airport.  See that’s where the folks in Congress fly out of, and they don’t want any safety compromises for themselves.  Wouldn’t be fair.  And the local Kansan Congressman who is so vociferous about cutting spending needs to be in Washington to get massive Federal Agriculture subsidies for his district.

Finally, what do we call the people who lose their jobs or whose businesses suffer in extremely conservative Garden City?  Why 'Born Again Democrats', of course.