Imagine Guv Douglas standing at the podium, bloody nose being held in handkerchief after being removed entirely from our collective face via a fine scalpel job. “These are tough times,” opines the guv, “And yes, that means we need to spite our faces!”

After all, who gives a crap about tomorrow when we have today to mess up?

An administration proposal to gut staff at the Agency of Natural Resources’ solid-waste program could be a serious setback to trash-reduction and recycling initiatives around the state, according to agency personnel and environmental watchdogs familiar with the plan.

(Waste program faces dramatic cut, Times Argus, 03/27/09)

The article goes on to explain how the job of running the state’s solid waste programs would simply be driven down to a lower political level … no mention of additional funds being made available to help those down the political ladder perform their job.

So here’s trick: to make the state budget look better, Douglas and company will gut programs dealing with how we manage our trash (so it doesn’t pollute our streams, fill up our countryside, spread around our roadsides and more) by pushing the job down a couple political levels to folks who don’t have the time or resources to do the job.

And Douglas will wave our collective nose high in the air proclaiming how he absolutely had to cut that damn thing off to spite our collective face.

This is identical to what Douglas and company want to do to our education budgets: pass off a state responsibility (teacher retirement funding) to the towns without worrying about the reality that towns are having a hard time paying for what they’re expected to pay for.