the government's inability to count billboards in a state, days in a week, and houses in a community

Hey, if they can't take care of this, why would one expect them to be great at Cash for Clunkers, economic "stimulus", or health care/insurance?

Two words: blind faith!


From Debbie Harbeson in the Jeff/NA News-Tribune...

...worried about the government’s ability to count....How bad is it? Let me count the ways.

Actually, I will only count a few ways because there are far too many, one could even say countless, examples to fit within my limited word count. Besides, if any government officials are reading this, I wouldn’t want to confuse them with too high a number. So I’m going to share three, one example from each layer of government: federal, state and local.

The first example concerns the recent news that Indiana is in trouble with the feds because the state has somehow grossly miscounted the number of billboards lining the highways. This is a problem because the federal government bureaucrats have the authority to withhold money based on a provision in the Highway Beautification Act....

Anyway, now the state is trying to correct their failure to maintain an accurate inventory of these billboards so they don’t lose any federal money. But guess what? Yep, they need money to correct this problem. Two million dollars has been suggested....

OK, let’s move down to a state level counting requirement. Did you know that for a long time Indiana’s government schools claimed that one-half is equal to one? In the past, when school was in session for a half-day, it was counted as a whole day.

But then, the new Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett, decided they better use the same math most of us use in the real world so he changed the rule. I’m not sure it really makes much difference though. The number of days of compulsory attendance required tells us nothing about whether a child is actually learning anything, besides counting down the days to the end of the year.

Finally, thanks to local citizen and soon-to-be forced Jeffersonville resident Bruce Herdt, we have a local example. He discovered the possibility of a huge mistake in the count of homes involved in Jeffersonville’s annexation.

The mistake could number in the thousands, which I find amazing. After all, a house is a pretty hard object to miss when counting. Most preschoolers with just a few hours of Sesame Street under their elastic waist should be able to count something as big as houses without messing up too bad.

I don’t know, maybe someone can do something to help these people get better at performing such elementary tasks. But I’m not counting on it.