Posted on 05/07/2008 7:32:51 AM PDT by SmithL
...does anybody know if American cities were forced into bankruptcy during the Depression?...my feeling is they were not...if Goldman Sacs is right, and we have $7-8 gas in 2009; then we’ll have a scenario straight out of 1932.
Aha! Just raise taxes! Again, and again and again until the unions are satisfied. =)
What does the gas price have to do with your sense of municipal solvency?
Oh wait, Vallejo is run by libs.
Never mind.
LOL! That ship has sailed, dude.
It looks to me like the closing of the Mare Island Naval Base did them in.
Unions back dims, right?
ALL the ships have sailed! Vallejo has never recovered from shutting down Mare Island Naval Shipyard. Of course, they continued spending like they had before the shutdown, fully expecting more free money to fall from the sky.
Bureaucratic liposuction, if you will.
What does the gas price have to do with your sense of municipal solvency?”
everything
“Miami went bellow up in the 90’s.”
bellow up?....what, they’re running a blacksmith forge down there?
You might want to do a better job of explaining that, because it makes no sense so far...
And it’s not because they spent to much, it is because they couldn’t rip any more money away from the deadbeat taxpayers. Let this be a lesson to all of us who don’t want more taxes!/SARCASM
Your analysis is very in-depth and informative.
Aside: We live in the Dallas Ft, Worth area and my son was living and working in Vallejo and my neighbor who was a friend passed away in Vallejo; yet, they didn't know, or at least my son didn't, they were both staying in Vallejo.
There is something evil about unions.
Nope, they were done in by Proposition 13, and it was the outcome the taxpayers had in mind when they passed it. For decades, public employee unions have been using the dues money they extorted from their members to 'buy' politicians in legislative bodies. Those politicians (primarily Democrats), in turn, have given them everything they asked for. When the money ran out, they just raised taxes. With the possibility of raising taxes foreclosed, the politicians kept operating as usual, and this is the result. Vallejo started running a deficit during the 'good times', back in '04, but the band played on.
I watched the meeting last night, and highly recommend viewing it on the city's website. It's a great cautionary tale of just how ticked-off the public can be at a group of elected officials. Public comment went on for almost three hours, most of it pretty unpleasant.
There's some inaccurate figures floating around that overstate the problem. Cops, for example, are not "making 250 thousand a year", but the general story line of elected officials who let their city get locked into labor contracts that are indexed to things that don't track their revenue is pretty accurate. In part, the declaration was an effort to get the unions to agree to cuts, so in that sense it's part of the bargaining process. Whether they'll come to their senses or let it proceed to the courts is the open question.
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