That’s the new meme, first espoused on these pages by Dollar Bill and now on Bloomberg. Because of “Tea Party” demands, Colorado Springs has fewer firefighters and policemen these days and because of that, damages from fire and crimes by looters increased.
So what did this draconian tax cut demand? That government spending increase no more than inflation and population growth. Excuse me? The alternative, as practiced by Stockton, California and Chicago, Illinois and most other cities around the country, is to keep increasing spending with no intention of paying for it.
[Mayor] Bach said the city is on the path toward financial implosion anyway because of overly generous pensions and too many parks.
“Forget the fire,” said the mayor, whose office has an easel with a chart depicting Colorado Springs’s financial status, after a briefing on the blaze June 30. “At our current cost curve, we’ll be insolvent in eight years.”
Not to knock a city when it’s down, but C Springs is the armpit of Colorado. Long gone are the days when this town thrived. More hookers per capita than college students or AF cadets. Rampant homelessness, and I’m talking crazy loonies living on the streets, mental patient stuff. Looters are from that fringe population, not from the devoted neighbors who lost their homes. And what says every town in this nation should survive? Isn’t it the survival of the fittest? So if a town isn’t fit, you must a-quit!
Govt. forest land does not get harvested at all and therefore creates the potential for an abundance of fuel for these fires.
It is indeed governmental policy that has set the stage for these massive fires, as foresters warned for decades as dead fuel piled up. It’s (almost) funny how people wil ignore or dismiss warnings like this and then when exactly the harm predicted occurs, look to assign blame – in this case, the firing of 37 firemen – to anything except their own actions. Moynihan on welfare comes to mind.
I live in a state plagued by decades of Democratic rule (California) and this state has always had a boom/bust economy. Democrats are like children, if you give them a booming economy they act (history doesn’t count) like it will never end.
The thing that pisses me off most about the budget cuts is that these wise Democratic rulers always, always, cuts the public facing workers. The teachers, the cops, the firefighters, but we never see corresponding cuts to the administrative hierarchy above these workers. Why shouldn’t there be cuts there? If there are fewer workers, why shouldn’t there be layoffs at upper levels of management? Why shouldn’t supervisors have to increase their span of control when there are fewer workers left to manage?
Four years ago the State of California announced they were cutting hours, not replacing retiring workers, and froze hiring. No new hires? Bullshit, when I took a buyout to avoid a layoff at a private company in late 2008 one of my fellow buyout’ers went right to work for the State in January 2009 because she was hired into a “revenue generating agency”. A friend who was laid off by the county as a sheriff’s deputy went to work for the state’s Department of Justice.
You never hear about principals, vice principals, administrators, or headquarters staff and support ever getting laid off at any of these agencies that cut front line workers.
, sorry for the rant.
I agree with Anonymous from California (where I’m from originally), spending cuts always hit the public safety sector first, never the welfare fraud rolls, illegal immigrant schooling, environmentalists, or politicians salaries, or any of the other 500 separate bogus bureaucracies that Liberal Californians deem so necessary for their existence.
Liberalism is herpes of the mind.