SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. -- When this sun-drenched exurb east of Los Angeles filed for bankruptcy protection in August, the city attorney suggested fraudulent accounting was the root of the problem.Read the rest here.
The mayor blamed a dysfunctional city council and greedy police and fire unions. The unions blamed the mayor. Even now, there is little agreement on how the city got into this crisis or how it can extricate itself.
"It's total political chaos," said John Husing, a former San Bernardino resident and regional economist. "There is no solution. They'll never fix anything."
Yet on close examination, the city's decades-long journey from prosperous, middle-class community to bankrupt, crime-ridden, foreclosure-blighted basket case is straightforward — and alarmingly similar to the path traveled by many municipalities around America's largest state. San Bernardino succumbed to a vicious circle of self-interests among city workers, local politicians and state pension overseers.
A Correct Way to Correct
12 hours ago
6 comments:
Remind me why the other 49 need to save California?
Multiply this by the West at-large. These future obligations will simply not be paid.
For every dollar California sends to Washington it gets less than 80 cents back. Remind me why California needs to save Mississippi?
According to this article, California houses one-third of the US's welfare recipients despite being one-eighth of the population.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/california-pushing-more-welfare-recipients-142406301.html
Hence, it would be helpful to see more detail on how California's net-payor status is calculated. Again though, this just underscores the absurdity of federal taxation and spending.
AG-
"Most of the recipients, however, are children — more than three-quarters of the 1.5 million in the welfare-to-work program CalWORKs, which stands for California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids. The rest are mostly single mothers who must work or participate in job training and related activities to receive cash assistance."
Using a little intelligence, it's easy to guess the reason for this situation- the high income inequality that exists in California and the rest of the U.S.
It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a child brought up in poverty, with little opportunity or incentive to progress, will become a poor adult in most cases.
It's really tiring to read comments by people who, clearly, have benefited from the efforts of their parents and other elders in their community yet stridently argue against helping those, mainly children,, who will one day be the ones responsible, in some form or other, for providing the finances for their upkeep in their old age...In other words, Social Security.
It's really tiring to read comments by people who, clearly, have benefited from the efforts of their parents and other elders in their community yet stridently argue against helping those, mainly children...
Where are those children's "parents and other elders?" All you're really proving is that there are a lot of people in California who have children they can't afford.
California, like Greece, is proof that everybody can't live off everybody.
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