Books Are A Luxury, Citizen

And while we're on the subject of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal being an asshole, let's have another round of applause for what massive GOP revenue elimination at the state level brings: a government that dies off in bits and pieces.

Citing budget concerns, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed a $25-billion budget that eliminates almost $900,000 in state funding for its libraries. In a statement, the governor’s chief budget aide, Paul Rainwater, said, “In tight budget times, we prioritized funding for healthcare and education. Operations such as local libraries can be supported with local, not state dollars.”

Sorry, rural parts of Louisiana like Concordia Parish.  Libraries are a luxury and a drain on our precious job creators.  Fund them your gorram selves.  That would of course means raising local taxes, which is prohibited and will only assure that the Tea Party eliminates you from public office.  You will make do, citizen.  All hail the job creators.

“There’s no longer a food stamp office; there’s no longer a social security office. In our rural parish, a lot of our people have low literacy skills and very few computer skills. They come to the library because all of that has to be done online. There are some offices in some bigger areas but there’s no mass transportation and a lot of our people do not have transportation to a place that’s two hours away. A lot of our people have children in the military and they come to email their children that are all over the world on these bases. And almost all of the companies require you to do a job application online, even if it’s just for a truck driver who doesn’t need to be great at computer skills, so it is very important that we offer this service."

Concordia formerly got $12,000 per year from the state, which it used to “keep up all of the maintenance [on its 52 PCs], buy new software, and to buy new equipment as needed.”

With that money gone, Concordia plans not to buy anything new, and hopes all its old equipment keeps working. Maintenance costs will have to come out of the materials budget. In the meantime, Taylor is already working on getting the funding restored. “We are already talking to our legislators about the next budget,” she said. “We are going to work really hard to make the legislators understand how important it is in these rural areas because citizens depend on the public library. We’re going to hope for the Legislature to open their eyes to what we do every day.”

The Legislature works for the job creators, citizen.  If you want a job, you'll fill out an application online.  If you can't find a way to do that, you clearly don't want the job badly enough. The job creators will not be inconvenienced with taxes and regulatory burdens to pay for you freeloaders "reading books" and "using computers".  If you want to have libraries and access to the internet, you would get a job and buy it yourself.  The job creators are sick and tired of your whining.  Convince someone with money to fund it.  We have better things to do with tax money, like giving it to the job creators.

If you're reading this right now, you have access to the internet.  So why are you complaining, citizen?

All hail the job creators.  Now get back to work.