Have another; it's on the House
Krayton Kerns
1.16.08
The New Year is here and it is time to address the magical subject of hangovers. Did you ring in ’08 with far too many trips to the punch bowl? There are three types of people at every party: The first type sings off-key and dances on tables. The second type cheers them on while asking if they need another drink. The third tries to give them a ride home.
The morning after, and there always is a morning after, the table-dancers are toast. Here’s where the hangover works its magic. In a very, very, soft voice our reveler declares, “I will never, ever do that again.”
As a case in point, one morning I watched my hunting buddy very slowly and very quietly lace his boots with his fanny draped over a blue Coleman cooler. He mumbled, “If you ever see me take a drink of whiskey again, just shoot me.”
I knew exactly what he was going through because I sat on that same cooler a couple years earlier. I don’t sit there anymore. For the second New Year’s Eve in a row my trophy wife and I were in bed by nine o-clock. That is the fringe benefit of getting old and boring.
Earlier this week, while running with friends, we were discussing the recent holiday and the coming year. I reminisced about the great five week Christmas break I had during my college years. My youngest is home from the University of Wyoming and I mentioned he had slept until 10:00 am the previous morning.
As we trotted along one of my running comrades chimed in, “I don’t know how anyone can sleep that late. If I do that I spend the rest of the day suffering from a ‘sleep hangover’”.
“Wow, a sleep hangover”, I thought to myself. That is something I had never considered; there are different kinds of hangovers. I started thinking.
The governor has a hangover…a ‘spending hangover’. For the past two legislative sessions the governor was the life of the party. He was flush with cash and was dancing on the tables while the state bureaucrats cheered him on with ‘fat steaks and whiskey’. The conservatives offered him a ride home, but he would have none of that.
Montana tax payers overpaid the bar-tab by $1.3 billion dollars. To keep the ‘old ball and chain’ conservatives from busting the party, the governor tossed $100 million to resident home owners in the form of $400 rebate checks. He spent the rest. Had the entire bar-tab overpayment been returned, homeowners would have received $5200 instead of $400. (That’s $1.3 billion divided amongst 250,000 qualifying homeowners.)
Now it is the morning after. Figuratively, the governor is quietly sitting on the blue Coleman cooler lacing his boots and assessing the damage of a three year party. The state government has grown 39% and added 1000 new employees. They aren’t going away.
As he fumbles with his boots the governor mumbles to, “Tamp down your expectations.” “The state won’t have the revenue the next two years that it has enjoyed since 2005.” (Gazette 1-11-08)
And then, just like my hunting buddy who swore off whiskey once the bottle was empty, the governor muttered a phrase common to those suffering a spending hangover, “At some point, somebody’s got to say ‘no’, and that’s my job.” (Gazette 1-8-08) Yep, everyone is a fiscal conservative once all of the money has been spent.
