Here's a Little Political Test for You

See if you can figure out what's wrong with this situation in Boston:

The Franklin Park Zoo, a Boston landmark for nearly a century, may be forced to close and euthanize up to a fifth of the animals in its care due to devastating budget cuts.

New England's largest zoo and its counterpart, the Stoneham Zoo, saw their state funding cut from $6.5 million to $2.5 million by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, the Boston Globe reported, and expects to run out of money by October.

Zoo officials said they would have to lay off most of their 165 employees and find new homes for the more than 1,000 animals they currently house, the Globe reported. Those they cannot relocate — at least 20 percent, officials estimate — may have to be destroyed.

The Zoo's director is now calling on state lawmakers to override Gov. Patrick's decision, which he made with a line-item veto of the legislature's budget. More than half of the zoo's funding comes from the state.

The Franklin Park Zoo was founded in 1913, and along with the Stoneham Zoo, draws about 570,000 visitors annually.

"This is just another bad decision on budget cuts,” Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino told the Globe. “It's a great resource for the community. The zoo is an inexpensive place to spend a day in tough economic times."

If you're saying what's wrong is that the state has cut funding and the zoo will have to close, congratulations, you're a Democrat. If you're saying what's wrong is that the state has been subsidizing something that should be supported by the visitors, congratulations, you're a Republican.

The last paragraph of the story sort of says it all. The zoo probably is an inexpensive place, but that's because a big chunk of the costs are being born by the state's taxpayers. The Democrat solution is to reinstate the funding and keep having taxpayers subsidize the visitors that are actually using the zoo.

A Republican solution would be to pass the missing $4 million onto the zoo's visitors. If they have 570,000 visitors a year, and they just lost $4 million in funding, simple math tells us that raising the entry fee $8 will fix the problem.

Now, I realize that if you raise the entry fee $8, some of those $570,000 may choose to stay home. You may have to raise the fee $10 to cover those who will bail out at the higher entry fee, but if they want to continue operating and don't want to be providing free monkey meat to every Thai restaurant in the city, that's what they need to do.

This then becomes a free market exercise. If the market says it wants to have a zoo, it will continue to support it. If having a zoo is less important than saving the extra $10, it's monkey meat for everyone!