The Conservative Cave
Current Events => The DUmpster => Topic started by: SSG Snuggle Bunny on October 23, 2012, 09:31:01 PM
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You can either scale back your moronic invasions against personal liberty and responsibility or you can face electoral rejection or simple, cold reality will drive you to your knees:
What Austerity Looks Like
Bankrupt San Bernardino’s new, skeletal government
22 October 2012
Three interconnected forces brought the working-class, inland Southern California city of San Bernardino to insolvency: a burst housing bubble and lethargic economic growth; high police and firefighter salaries mandated by the city’s charter; and compounding pension obligations. Bankruptcy should give San Bernardino leverage to deal with the last two, but the big, structural changes required will not be easy or pleasant. Absent such changes, though, salaries and pensions will continue to grow faster than the city’s revenues, crowding out most other government functions and services. San Bernardino offers a telling illustration of austerity’s causes and effects: a tragic failure to think beyond the short term eventually necessitates painful reforms.
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In cutting overall expenditures nearly 25 percent, the city leaves virtually no department untouched—including city hall, which will operate with a skeleton crew. Since 2006, the mayor’s office has gone from ten employees to three, counting the mayor. The city eliminated six positions from its information-technology department, cutting to the point at which “core†functions would be threatened. The city has combined departments, contracted out services, and even closed down its successful Operation Phoenix program, an anti-crime initiative Mayor Pat Morris launched shortly after taking office in 2005. San Bernardino’s community-policing effort will thus lose its two headquarters, which also served as community centers. Three of the city’s four libraries will close, while layoffs will hit 32 parks department employees and one-third of the city’s code-enforcement officers.
http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc1022jr.html
In other words, San Bernadino is becoming what it should have been all along.
One way or another conservativism wins. We do not offer our policies because we are the morbid fantasies you entertain yourselves with to feel morally superior; we make our claims based on the inevitability of history.
The sooner you realize this the fewer people you will stop hurting and the more people will become stronger through self-reliance and responsibility...which--BTW--obviates the need for all those government services you say we have to go bankrupt supplying just to be considered decent people.
We win.
One way or another we win.
Get used to it.
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And what they don't realize.....
People came to rely upon those jobs. Firemen and police officers who were promised they could retire from that profession after twenty years at the ripe old age of between 38 and 42. They planned their lives on pensions that never could be paid, even if that could be papered over for a while. The bureaucrats on the mayor's staff. The IT tech guys.
People also came to rely upon those services. San Bernadino probably isn't like a small town that can get by with an all volunteer fire fighting force, but chances are that a good number of their departments served areas that could have been served by volunteer stations just as well. But now, the city probably has some union contract obligation to pay salaries and pensions for all fire fighting services.
Likewise, the residents have never been encouraged to take personal or community pride in their parks. They could follow rules of "pack in, pack out" for all trash and the mayor could ask for help from the community revitalizing the parks during the spring. Now, the residents view the parks as just another service the city provides and who cares if it gets destroyed, it's the cities problem.
You're right SSB. The problem is not only that liberal policies eventually fail, they leave people far worse off than before because they have no notion of taking pride in their community.
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Conservatives will win because you can't live in a made up world forever. You can fight gravity for a wile but eventually gravity will win, always.
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Conservatives will win because you can't live in a made up world forever. You can fight gravity for a wile but eventually gravity will win, always.
As my daughter found out Monday, when she tripped on the playground at school and did a faceplant into the gravel on the playground. She cut her forehead and both knees. I called my MIL to blame her (as a joke), and much to my chagrin, she took full responsibility for that section of DNA. It's no fun trying to jerk your MIL's chain, when she agrees with you . . . :thatsright: :( :whistling: O-)