Fiscal Year Quotes
This historical quotation is surprising to us over a century later. We are surprised at the very large revenue from the then relatively low tax rates on alcohol and tobacco and many people who did not pay their taxes at the time. Also, the incredibly small appropriation for the military. WWI was only 4 years away. Generally, until the Second World War, the Democratic party did not advocate large military expenditures and the Republicans were more isolationist and opposed almost all defense spending. After WWII, the Republican Party flip flopped and became the champion of military readiness and defense spending.
Many politicians had been complaining that the CDC and NIH had not trained more community hospital staffs in infectious disease protection techniques when the Ebola problem came to America. However, the budgets for these kinds of activities had been cut back each of the recent previous years. Lee made the assumption that Congress wanted government to work. In actuality there was a strong core of legislators in that Congress, who wanted government to fail so that citizens would tire of spending money on failures and thereby shrink the size of government. The members of Congress who wanted government to be effective however at that time had other more dramatic uses of money that training and capacity building of local hospitals.
This quotation shows that in 1922 a major state prison was operated at a profit with NO COST to the taxpayer. They key was that the Warden was an experienced successful businessman who put the prison into a number of different businesses which paid the expenses and taught the inmates marketable skills like stone carving. The model however has been opposed by businesses in the area which saw the prison as competition and labor unions which saw the model as taking jobs away from honest, non-criminal workers and not paying high wages.
In subsequent years military officers got around this restriction by privately expressing confidential opinions to members of Congress and the press. In the Iraq war for example most senior military officers felt that more troops were needed in Iraq. However, since the President decided on the final troop count only one official, the Army Chief of Staff, has publicly expressed the view that it was insufficient. He was retired early. The stricture still stands.
