Maybe this is what the future looks like. With tax receipts drying up, communities are tasked with figuring out what services will no longer be offered. In Colorado Springs, a third of the streetlights were turned off, police are selling the helicopters they relied on for rapid response and eliminating the vice team and reducing the burglary investigators, closing recreation centers and libraries, eliminating city bus service in the evenings and on weekends, and no longer doing road repair.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for California school districts to cut the school calendar by a week and a local school board in California intends to eliminate junior and senior high school spring sports as a means of addressing a $5.7M budget shortfall. The board noted that next year football and basketball would likely be dumped.
Of course, there are ramifications above and beyond turning off some streetlights and canceling baseball. What effects the loss of public services, police and fireman in Colorado Springs has on tourism and convention traffic is unknown. A downturn there, in turn effects local businesses catering to tourism which, in turn, means less tax dollars for the city.
There were, no doubt, some high school seniors hoping a baseball or track scholarship was their ticket into college. They, obviously, will now go without that opportunity.
And then there's this.
Nevada officials on Tuesday outlined drastic cuts to the state's Medicaid program that include plans to ration adult diapers, eliminate denture and hearing-aid programs, and force personal care assistants to buy their own disposable gloves.
State lawmakers learned of the cuts at a committee hearing in which health officials said adult day care programs, vision services and outpatient programs for people with brain trauma would also be cut to slash $109 million from Medicaid costs.The grim proposals brought criticism and rebuke from lawmakers of both parties over Gov. Jim Gibbons' comments that Nevada can no longer pay for "bloated government services."
For Christ's sake. We're going to start telling incontinent seniors they'll have to stay in a soiled diaper because they've already used up their allotment for the day? Deny denture and hearing aids to the growing number of Medicaid recipients?
And, even more offensive - tell folks who, for very little money, wade into people's shit and blood that they're just going have to pony up to supply their own disposable gloves?
There's probably a post to be written here about intransigent governments and this ridiculous "we'll die before we're taxed more" mentality.
To a great extent, we get to decide what kind of country we want to live in. It's a surprise to me that this is what we're choosing.
Letting helpless old people fester and die in their own shit and blood is, in fact, what America is all about today. (That, and torturing hapless foreigners). We are a nation of sociopaths; the only thing that differentiates us from zombies is our hypocrisy.
ReplyDeleteDoubly ironic. You've surely heard the old "Democracies don't last because the people eventually vote themselves the treasury."
ReplyDeleteWorks both ways.
At some point states and municipalities are going to have to confront their unionized work force. It ain't gonna be pretty.
ReplyDeleteOf course instead of giving trillions to the bankers so that they could head back to the roulette wheel, far fewer total dollars could have been distributed to the states for infrastructure/environmental investment etc. But that wouldn't make any sense. The well-placed need to be there to catch most of the cash if we expect the little people to only get a trickle down their way.