My friends, last month Indiana lost 16,500 jobs.

If you didn’t hear me the first time, allow me to repeat: 16,500 jobs.

There are plenty of economists and political hacks who will tell you that one month’s numbers are a statistical anomaly and we shouldn’t be worried.

Unfortunately, this has been happening month after month since Mitch Daniels took office.

That might not be a huge problem if Daniels hadn’t made a big deal in 2004 promising to bring thousands of new jobs here.

Has he brought jobs? Yes. Half as many as former Gov. Joe Kernan did. Oh, and Daniels has had twice as much time.

The Gov’s people are now trying to say he’s brought thousands more jobs here, but we just have to wait a little longer for them to appear.

I guess that’s the ‘I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today’ method of governing.

Daniels’ latest internal polling shows him up by almost 20 points over unknown and under-funded Democratic challenger Jill Long Thompson. He’s on track to win a second term.

Let’s hope, if he does, that he starts paying attention to the promises he makes - and the people who get hurt when they don’t come true. Those jobs are people, not just numbers.

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard gets a big thumbs up from me this week. The Mayor managed to give his budget address the same day he was rushed to the hospital for possible heart trouble.

While I’m glad the Mayor is okay, I jokingly opined that trying to fix the budget mess left behind by the last administration was enough to give anyone cardiac arrest.

Let me show you a few examples.

The Mayor’s office budget went up more than $220,000. That was because the former administration would fund their employees with money from other departments so it looked like they were saving the taxpayers money.

Here’s another accounting trick. The people who used to run this place did a lot of inter-agency double billing. And when they stopped the practice, both agencies took credit for the budget cut. Those practices cost you millions of dollars.

And here’s a nice kicker, the former people in charge allocated funds that weren’t there to pay for projects and thought they could skate by and deal with them after the election. Apparently someone forgot about the voters.

So after cleaning up the former administration’s mess, the Ballard people closed a $26 million shortfall. Paid for public safety, economic development, roads and infrastructure, found cash to deal with abandoned housing and still has more than $4 million left over.

Be still my beating heart.

My friends, I’d like to share with you this week a page from the Republican privatization handbook.

The process of selling off our critical assets and services goes something like this: Ohmygawd, we just got into office and this stuff is soooooo messed up. We’re too dumb to fix it ourselves, so we’re going to pay the private sector to do it.

You know, the private sector, with its companies like Halliburton, the kind of entities you know you can trust with taxpayer dollars and essential services.

At the state level, Mitch Daniels’ privatization fixation has given us prison riots, Hoosiers stuck on hold trying to get food stamps and a Toll Road that will turn a profit for foreign companies for 65 years.

Now we’re watching Greg Ballard do the same thing with the Mayor’s Action Center.

Behind closed doors and without asking for input, he decided to issue a request for proposals to take over the front lines of customer service in city government.

It’s sad to me that in America, a country that prizes ingenuity, our public servants are all too eager to throw in the towel and admit they can’t solve our problems.

If that’s the case, why don’t we just elect HAL or Joshua to office? Computers aren’t accountable to anyone, but then again, neither are these people.

As the old saying goes, the road to you know where is paved with good intentions. If you believe that then a Greenwood homeowners association is well on its way.

As RTV 6 reported earlier this week, the homeowners passed a rule banning anyone who was a sex offender from living in subdivision and anyone convicted of a sex offense would have to move.

This may sound nice, but it won’t do a darn bit of good. Actually, if these homeowners wanted to protect their kids from sex offenders, they may want to stop looking at who wants to move into their neighborhood, but instead look in their family photo albums.

According to the Justice Department, most sexual assaults are not done by strangers but by someone who knows the child.

So if the folks in Greenwood want to protect their kids from sexual predators, they may want to do a background check on their relatives, family friends, babysitters, or someone in a position of authority over the child or someone who supervises the child. Forget the stranger with candy and the raincoat.

And here’s something else for the folks in Greenwood to chew on; only a fraction of those who commit sexual assaults are caught and convicted.

In addition, up to half of all cases of child molestation are committed by other adolescents between the ages of 13 to 17.

Good luck with your ban. You’re gonna need it.

My friends, do you remember back when Greg Ballard, the tongue-tied middle manager who would be mayor, promised that he would cut $70 million in fluff out of the municipal budget?

Oh, to relive those halcyon days of campaign rhetoric.

It’s August 2008, and the rubber has officially met the road.

After making all those lofty promises, Ballard is now faced with the reality that he inherited a very lean budget from former Mayor Bart Peterson.

Over the weekend, the first hints of Ballard’s forthcoming budget began to trickle out. Here’s what you can expect: Cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts. And maybe a few fee hikes and some outsourcing for good measure.

Ballard has said everything but public safety is on the table. Let’s do the math.

Public safety accounts for about 60 percent of the roughly $1.1 billion city-county budget. That means Ballard would have to cut close to 20 percent of the non-public safety budget to meet his $70 million goal.

That’s a lot of numbers, but the reality is simple: This is going to be a brutal budget cycle, and Ballard’s got some splainin’ to do.

This time, maybe he’ll use real facts and figures instead of the ones he made up on the campaign trail.