To compensate, Wichita switched on the street lights

on

When Wichita city leaders tell us that the budget and spending have been cut to the bone, that everything that can be done to save money has already been done, remember my Friday trips to downtown for lunch.

Wichita Streetlights 5-30-2014 11-20-52 AMAt 11:20 am on a Friday with the sun brightly accentuating the fluffy clouds, it’s a good thing that only two of the four bench lights are lit. The other two, however, have probably expired from having been switched on all day for the past month.

But to compensate for the loss of those two, it appears the city decided to switch on the nearby overhead street lights.

Wichita Streetlights 5-30-2014 11-24-15 AMThe lights illustrated in this photograph are, undoubtedly, a small portion of the city’s spending. But you don’t have to look very hard to find waste like this, and we know that small examples of waste are multiplied many times. So when city leaders tell us that there is nowhere left to cut in the budget, that everything that can be done to trim the fat has already been done, and that the only thing we can do is raise taxes — well, think of this photograph and others illustrated in In Wichita, the streetside seating is illuminated very well, In Wichita, the rooftops are well-lit and On a sunny day in downtown Wichita you can see the street lights.

This is not to say that waste like this does not occur in the private sector. Of course it does. But businesses and individuals have a powerful incentive to avoid waste that isn’t present in government: Businesses and people are spending their own money.

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