Opinion: Smart Bureaucrats, Dumb Choices

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See, this is exactly why Americans don’t trust the judgment of their higher-ups.

Last autumn, a new LA city law took effect: if you don’t spay or neuter your dog or cat, your city pet license now costs $100, not $10. [Some exceptions were made for breeders.]

It was an absolutely terrific idea, considering that the city has to house and kill thousands of animals a year because there are more pets than homes for them. Across California, cities and counties spent something like a quarter-billion dollars to house and care for and, yes, kill unwanted pets.

The city’s new law saves money, and it saves lives.

The city also partnered this law with vigorous programs to help people pay for spaying and neutering. Smart. Really smart. Every dime spent on spaying and neutering would save the city -- meaning you, me, taxpayers -- a buck down the road on rounding up and sheltering and perhaps killing too many pets.

Here’s where the bone-headed part comes in. The city has to whack tens of millions out of its budget. So it’s no longer handing out $30 and $70 coupons for free discount spaying and neutering.

So the city manages to shave a few thousand bucks or tens of thousands of dollars -- now. What happens after ``now`` becomes ``then``? Those dogs and cats will go off and breed hundred and thousands more. The people who own them won’t pay the hundred bucks for a license for un-neutered pets; if they can’t afford spaying and neutering without help, they sure can’t afford a hundred-dollar license.

And in a year, or two, or five, the city will be on the hook for millions more -- the cost of taking in and sheltering and maybe killing all those dogs and cats. And it would never have happened if it had stayed on course instead of being penny-wise and pound-foolish, short-term wise, long-term foolish.

This quandary also requires all of us, as citizens and taxpayers, to be smarter about short-term and long-term costs, and to stand up for the right decisions that make the present harder than the future.

Just as health insurance will pay the stupefying cost of amputating your bad leg but won’t pay for the minimal costs of diabetes prevention that will keep you healthy iin the first place, so we whack and snip and shave now ... and pass along the much larger costs to the future.

For this will cost all of us a lot more in the long run -- and will cost thousands of blameless creatures their lives.

Nice work, LA.