Time for a telethon!
Posted on 08/27/2005 7:02:19 AM PDT by Graybeard58
You know you live in a blue state when ...
Detroit is in the throes of a budget crisis that dwarfs anything Connecticut has seen. With a $300 million deficit in its $1.4 billion budget for 2005-06 and bankruptcy looming, Detroit has laid off hundreds of workers and is in the process of idling at least 584 police officers and 150 firefighters. Thousands of school employees could get the ax, and up to 40 schools could be closed. Municipal-employee unions have made $47 million in health-care concessions. Civilian employees took 10 percent pay cuts to save $24 million. Taxes are going through the roof, yet the fiscal hemorrhaging continues.
But in the midst of this fiscal chaos, the city will spend $1 million to build a display pen for 20 European fallow deer and native Michigan animals at the city-run Belle Isle Nature Zoo, which yearly spends hundreds of thousands more than it takes in. The contractor for the patronage job is a longtime friend of the mayor who has no experience in working with zoos or animals.
City officials claim their hands are tied because voters authorized borrowing the money to pay for the pen last fall. But that was before the enormity of the city's budget crisis was revealed, and there's really nothing stopping the mayor from saying the city just can't afford the project while public safety and education are so threatened.
But this is how budget fiascos are perpetuated in Michigan, Connecticut and the other blue states: tax and spend yourself into a crisis, then tax and spend some more in the name of fiscal stability, but hold back enough public money to pay off political cronies.
Time for a telethon!
"You know you live in a blue state when ..."
Michigan isn't a blue state - it's a red state with an utterly corrupt blue city that dominates it (we could put Illinois and Pennsylvania in this as well).
Is it any wonder that any honest person or company is getting the hell out of Detroit?
What a craphole.
It has been losing people forever and still it keeps raising taxes for the graft and corruption it feeds.
The sad thing is, that without the Detroit metro area...Bush would have won MI twice...
Very true. PA would have gone Bush without Philly (even with blue Pittsburgh still in there) and IL w/o Chicago.
A comparison of Detriot MI and Henderson NV (fastest growing city for 8 years in the US):
http://www.neoperspectives.com/votingwithyourfeet.htm
That is a great thing. I remember reading that 47% of the population of Detroit was functionally illiterate! Can you imagine a worae indictment of the public schools?! The people of Detroit should be marching in the street to close them all down.
Don't forget that the taxes also have to feed goldbricking and featherbedding.
Huh?
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