David*Macinnis*Gill.com

Back in the Dark Ages when I was in col­lege, I worked in a cam­pus cafe­te­ria. One day, after a par­tic­u­larly low health inspec­tion and deservedly low score, an edict came down from Man­age­ment: Thou Must Clean Bet­ter Start­ing Now. Fair enough. The cafe­te­ria was messy, espe­cially the ice cream machine, which had a drip pan that could grow mold faster than a bag of week-old bread.

But on the same day, another edict came from Man­age­ment: Thou Shall Use Only One Towel Per Shift. Tow­els were a worker’s con­stant com­pan­ion, sort of Swiss Army Towel used to grab hot pans, dry drink spills, swipe up loose spaghetti, etc. The aver­age worker used 8–10 tow­els a night. The laun­dry bill was huge. Man­age­ment was faced with a bud­get crunch, and that laun­dry bill was an easy tar­get, the bud­getary low-hanging fruit.

The fact that there was no way that the two edicts (Thou Shall Clean and Thou Shall Use One Towel) could co-exist seemed to be lost on Man­age­ment. How can you clean with­out tow­els? How can you cut laun­dry costs while clean­ing well?

When I see the hor­ri­ble news about library cuts, I’m reminded of the Great Towel Con­tro­versy. The Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion is spend­ing billions—yes, billions—to raise test scores. Read­ing abil­ity is the #1 pre­dic­tor of aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment and high test scores. Yet at the same time, libraries are being closed. Book bud­gets are being cut. Librar­i­ans are being fur­loughed and laid-off. Why? Because libraries bud­gets are easy tar­gets for short-sighted Bureaucrats.

Over a hun­dred years ago, Andrew Carnegie, the sin­gle great­est cap­i­tal­ist in Amer­i­can his­tory, gave away mil­lions to build pub­lic libraries all across the coun­try because he real­ized that an edu­cated nation is a pros­per­ous nation. The heart of a democ­racy is its col­lected knowl­edge. Our Bureau­crats have for­got­ten that les­son. Rather than mak­ing the hard deci­sions they were elected to make, they are pluck­ing the low-hanging fruit.

Pres­i­dent Obama, Con­gress, gov­er­nors, state rep­re­sen­ta­tive, may­ors, and local politi­cians,  as a teacher, author, par­ent, and yes, 34% tax­payer, I implore you to make the right call for our chil­dren. Cut other spend­ing. Raise a few taxes. Drop one less bomb, fire one less mis­sile, into Pak­istan today.  You’re about to make a big mess cut­ting libraries, and there aren’t enough tow­els to clean up after you.