Lessons from Nassau County: High taxes don’t cushion the fall of the wealthy mighty

Flopping Aces ^ | 01-28-11 | Mataharley

[Starman417]

On Jan 26th, the NYTs splashed the headline… "New York State Seizes Finances of Nassau County". Bloomberg followed suit, but went the extra mile with their headline, New York Seizing Nassau County Finances Shows Limits of Tea Party Promises, to drag the fiscally responsible grassroots movement into Nassau County's spending failures. Always slow on the uptake came Reuters a day later, with their headline, SPECIAL REPORT: A Long Island Tax Cut Backfires on the Tea Party.

Not to be outdone, the Daily KO's took it to their predictable guttural and suggestive level, derogatorily proclaiming "teabagger", Edward P. Mangano, brought Nassau County "to it's knees."

Ugh... Nothing like a saunter thru the KO's mindset filth to make one feel the serious need for a shower....

The escalating level of misreporting, revisionist history and finger pointing in all the wrong directions had me scratching my head. First of all, the seizure of the county financials happened when Mangano was in 11th hour negotiations with labor on contracts, so was that premature, and for political points?

Secondly, how does one of the nation's wealthiest counties - where approximately half of the county's home values are over $565K" - go underwater when they are ranked as the #2 county with the highest property tax in 2009? The average Nassau County resident pays a whopping $8,940 annually. To top it all off, the county's unemployment rate of 6.6% last April was well below the state average.

At first blush, this would seem to be Obama's dream community. Wealthy, high taxes, low unemployment, and until just 12 months ago, Democrat controlled….

…. And yet still financially underwater. Gee, what a surprise.

The second head scratcher was the tea party link. Now I realize that it's a traditional lib/prog trait to assign all today's woes to the Bush administration, giving Obama every pass possible. But it's apparent that trait of politically convenient timelines isn't a two way street when it comes to Republican leadership in Nassau County. That said, I'd call the well heeled and labor entrenched Mangano about as "tea party" as Scott Brown. Meaning, it's more likely he was the better of the two alternatives when it came to gouging the residents with yet more taxes.

[marlon]

WOW,give the moonbats some points for creativity. I gotta tell you when I read that Nassau County had been taken over by the state due to insolvency the thought of blaming it on The Tea Party never even entered my mind. Go figure.