In February, the board of commissioners of Ohio’s Ashtabula County faced a scene familiar to local governments across America: a budget shortfall. They began to cut spending and reduced the sheriff’s budget by 20 per cent. A law enforcement agency staff that only a few years ago numbered 112, and had subsequently been pared down to 70, was cut again to 49 people and just one squad car for a county of 1,900 sq. km along the shore of Lake Erie. The sheriff’s department adapted. “We have no patrol units. There is no one on the streets. We respond to only crimes in progress. We don’t respond to property crimes,” deputy sheriff Ron Fenton told Maclean’s.I doubt if Ashtabula County is the only one where people are being told "you're on your own." Increasingly, you had better own a good gun, a few good fire extinguishers, a good first-aid kit and know how to use all three.
A quarter of all bridges being "structurally deficient". Where once the U.S. had the world's highest percentage of adults with post high school degrees, now we are 12th. Once public education, through state-supported schools and the "land grant" universities, were seen as a public good, a way to ensure a bright future. But now we are slipping back to an era when only the elites sent their children to college.
Between education and infrastructure, and, in large thanks to the greedy "no-tax on me" clowns in the Confederate party, this nation has, for thirty years now, cut back spending on government services and infrastructure, because it is more important to give tax cuts to the rich than to repair and upgrade the common spaces of our nation. The fastest train in this country, the Acela, is a milk-train slowpoke compared to trains in Europe and Asia. Some of the current "high-speed rail" proposals would mean that a passenger train would be able to go 79MPH, which was an impressive speed in the 19th Century.
We really are screwed and I don't see how it is ever going to change.
(H/T)
5 comments:
You're not wrong.
How is it that shoveling billions to Blackwater "necessary", but millions to pay people to fix the ROAD I DRIVE MY FUCKING CAR on is "waste"?
High speed rail.. I believe during the golden age of steam 79mph was not considered exceptionally fast. We made progress..backward.
Of course the bulk of the track theses days is so poor that 15mph is a risk to crews and the machines.
Bridges in in the local berg have or has recently had major work done to keep it safe.. but half are still pending, being served by Bailey bridges installed as temporary (at least for 10 years).
Eck!
I'd be a lot happier if the Federal government were to kill just about every entitlement program (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare payments to states, etc.), dismantle irrelevant and ineffective departments like Energy and Education, and devote the trillions of dollars saved to paying off our national debt and rebuilding our national infrastructure. Let the entitlement programs be run (and funded) by the States, which have no Constitutional limitations on what they can do. Reserve the Federal Government for those functions established for it by the Founding Fathers.
It's a pipe dream, of course, but I think it could work . . .
All I can suggest is that those rich mother fuckers not get out of their Limo's when they have a flat tire on their way to the bank.
If only we could bring all our armed forces home, from Iraqistan, Germany, North Korea Japan and every other country that doesn't need us. Then if we stopped paying for every military wet dream the MIC can't develop without going over budget. And if we got the services back doing their own work instead of hiring overpriced cowboys to guard bases and underpaid 3rd world nationals to clean the latrines. And finally if we adjusted the tax code to reward asset creation in the US, we might then have enough money to rebuild our once great nation and treat our citizens as if they were human beings. It's a pipe dream, of course, but I think it would work
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