Read about what’s happening in Colorado Springs Colorado these days if you want a sneak peak into what Milwaukee County would look like if the “kill off government” crowd gets their way. If your tax rate isn’t the first thing you consider when choosing where to live (and most people aren’t) and you actually value a high quality of life where you live, it’s frightening.
No pools, no parks, no street lights, slashed safety budgets, increased response times.. it goes on and on. But at least they didn’t have to raise taxes!!
This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and son Carter.
If this causes the Y2K-style end of the world scenario that seems to be suggested by the tone of the article, then surely a tax hike will come. But you make a valid point, Dan. A lot of people who want to cut spending in some vague sense get cranky when we start talking about what that means. People become dependent on government services and entitlements, and then it is very difficult to get rid of those programs. But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have been better off without them in the first place, and to me that is even more of an argument to halt government expansion. I don’t know too many people who are fighting to kill the government. The government is growing at an amazing pace. The people I know are just trying to slow that growth down. The realities of the recession seem to be helping that argument to resonate.
I wouldn’t call street lights, policemen or firefighters “entitlements”, but I hear what you’re saying.
I read the entire article, it’s more nuanced than Dan reports. The citizens of Colorado Springs are not “kill off government” or “shut down government” loons. The Post reports that:
“The deep recession bit into Colorado Springs sales-tax collections, while pension and health care costs for city employees continued to soar.”
The citizens of Colorado Springs did vote down a proposed tripling of their property because they are skeptical of the city government’s ability to spend wisely—the average city employee costs $89,000 a year in wages and benefits. It appears the citizens of Colorado Springs aren’t against taxes, they’re against poorly spent taxes.
Too, when there’s a budget crunch, you can always depend on the local government to cut police and fire protection first. Turning off street lights is just an extra
special pimping of the taxpayer.
Hm, it does appear that once you read the whole article it’s really not so much what Dan seems to have spun it into.
The real reason for the problems in Colorado Spring was overspending. Now that they are feeling the economic bite of Barack Obama’s trickle down poverty, the gravy train has ended. Colorado Springs was hit hard during the recession, and they have also lost more than 60% of the high paying tech jobs and companies that they relied on for taxes.
It wasn’t the evil conservative “end all government” anarchists that are so often imagined on this, and other web sites, that did Colorado Springs in… it was the lavish spending in good times that turned out to be unsustainable in bad times.
Of course Colorado Springs and all other city leaders think the only way to keep essential services running and keeping parks kept up is to raise taxes….it’s a mantra that permeates government at every level. The problem with government is that they never look at the costs that are not determined by market forces. The biggest example is the Cadillac benefits (health, retirement, etc) government workers get in comparison to the private sector. You start getting those costs in line with the common working person, and your garbage cans will reappear, lights will be left on, and police will be patrolling the streets. Problem is, nobody wants to touch that golden goose, so the only “solutions” they feel are at their disposal is massive tax increases, or draconian cuts…..
Agreed! The only ones who deserve Cadillac benefits is bankers who screw up the economy. Hear, hear!
Jill, when we finally throw in the towel on the whole acting like the banking industry isn’t a part of the US government thing, what will you do? Are you going to go delete all your anti-banking comments since they’re now exposed as anti-government comments? Or will you just join me at the next Tea Party?
The percentage of banking executives receiving market driven benefits is FAR less than the millions of government employees getting way better benefits than their counterparts in the private sector. On a side note, it’s interesting that your rebuttal is to blame “big business” or those “evil executives”, and not actually coming up with a coherent argument…..(well, not actually interesting as it is typical)
Sean, if they stop blaming the “the rich”, then who are they going to blame? Government? Unions? Regulation? Themselves? You see the problem they’d have.
If you reject economics and if you can’t blame yourself, there isn’t much left to blame that fits your ideology except “the rich”. And “the rich” refers to anyone with a higher income than you (even though rich people don’t have wage income), with zero adjustment for risk taken to earn that income.
The left takes advantage of the emotion and anger the populace has at the question “why am I and everyone else not rich”, and lies about the answer, and banks on the populace’s ignorance on topics like inflation and “job creation”. Their solutions are childishly insulting… e.g., if person A is rich and person B is not, then we will take some money from person A and give to person B.
Problem solved, right?!
It’s why the left (a generalization, admittedly)has a hard time blaming government for anything. I for one believe government takeover of most things is inefficient, wasteful, and all in all bad for whatever it is they are being asked to “manage”. That’s easy for me to say, I’m a conservative. I believe in less government intervention because it’s the best for our country. The left cannot make government, unions, etc the bad guy, because it’s their solution….I agree with your point wholeheartedly regarding “the rich”, it’s unfortunate that we still have to play class warfare all the time.
BTW, thanks for the definition of “rich”. I always hear we need to tax the rich more, and always wondered what the definition of “rich” was…got it now!
Hah! That’s what you get for not wanting to pay taxes. Sure am glad I don’t live there. Thinking of changing your name to New Detroit? That’s what your city will look like going forward. A perfect example of why paying taxes is good.