Matt Blunt Balances the Budget on the Back of "Sandy"

In its standard way, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch starts a story, entitled Facing budget cuts, CAC could ‘cease to exist', with an anecdote that tugs at our heartstrings:

Imagine growing up in an atmosphere where domestic violence was commonplace and your own father sexually abused you.

As horrific as it sounds, this was reality for "Sandy" (not her real name).

The abuse and violence were so bad that Sandy initially denied the situation existed to Division of Family Service caseworkers. She denied it because she was too frightened to tell the truth.

But when caseworkers took her to the Child Advocacy Center in De Soto, everything changed. The fear subsided and Sandy spoke about her abuse. Her abuser eventually pleaded guilty and is now behind bars.

Of course, it goes from tugging our heartstrings to encouraging the state government to continue to cut our pursestrings to fund a domestic abuse shelter for which Governor Blunt might 1.9 million dollars in funding. Split across 14 centers, that means that the shelter that helped "Sandy" would lose a little over $100,000.

One would think the organization could find $100,000 per shelter, but people who would lose the free money disagree:

"I have spoken to the (governor's) general counsel and their response was to let charities step in and pick up the money," Wilkins said. "The fact is that these people operate on a tremendous amount of grant money and contributions already and there is a limit to what you can get from the private sector, especially for what I believe is an office in the government sector."

Sounds like Governor Blunt could help the shelters out by removing that dreaded office in the government sector tag, and perhaps a corporation could step in with naming rights or box tickets.

Okay, perhaps that last thought is a little silly, but so are the wailings and lamentations for $100,000 a year for these small programs that the government cuts. The government is full of these relatively small (by government standards) programs whose work the private sector, whether charities or businesses, could handle, in many cases more efficiently than the government since there's no automatic increase every year into perpetuity.