“Spend nothing unless absolutely necessary”
So familiar, it sends a chill:
“Spend nothing unless absolutely necessary,” Gov. George F. Drew advised the Florida legislature in 1877, and lawmakers took his advice to heart, abolishing the penitentiary, thus saving $25,000, and abandoning a nearly completed Agricultural College, leaving the state without any institution of higher learning, public or private. Alabama’s Redeemers closed public hospitals at Montgomery and Talladega and Louisiana’s were “so economical that . . . state services to the people almost disappeared.” Similar reductions affected provisions for the insane and blind as well as appropriations for Southern paupers, despite the lingering effects of the
