For that matter, not every program should be saved. Of course you realize I am not talking about your program, I am talking about theirs (pointing vaguely in the air at someone else).
If you live somewhere in the Charlotte area, you may have heard that the Concord and Hickory air traffic control towers are currently scheduled to be closed due to budget cuts. If anything is scheduled to be closed, it should probably not be air traffic control towers – but I suspect one of two things will happen here.
Either the traffic will do just fine by being handled at Charlotte-Douglas, perhaps with additional staff paid for by the very same people who didn’t want to pay for those towers, or someone somewhere will figure out a way to pay for these employees elsewhere. Perhaps even the individuals using the fields will do so, such as the NASCAR teams that use the Concord airport and say that they need the controllers in the first place.
So what is the real problem? The real problem is that not every program can be saved. It is simply not possible to continue paying for everything, because the checkbook has a limit. This is a lesson that I try and teach our kids (and my wife).
Either the service is not needed, the service can be consolidated or those that use the service can pay for it themselves. There should be no need for the government to continue to pay for one thing after another, but that is exactly where we are now – it seems like the first reaction is to immediately expect them to do so.
Even online, where such things are often treated with a “hands off” policy, such responses are turning to the need of government interference. The other day a discussion on online content was met with one post after another of “the authorities need to be involved in this” and “someone needs to take this down”. Perhaps the problem is not that the content is there, but that we instead depend too much on someone else to resolve the problem.
Instead of that, maybe we shouldn’t be so gullible in thinking that typing “1” in a comment box will result in an image somehow changing into something else. Maybe instead of building a new billion-dollar stadium for a pro sports team, we should let them move. I suspect that, like other cities who have done so (see Los Angeles), we would be just fine without them.