The municipality of Harrisburg, Pa. has $610 million in liabilities - ten times its yearly budget. The kid’s grades are pretty bad, and those who can live outside the city do, but the school buildings are beautiful, and they own a hotel and a minor league baseball team.
At least the mayor who ran the city – into the ground – from 1982 through 2010 is gone. I’d call him Boss Hog, but that may be too nice. From Reason TV via Big Government.
Harrisburg’s fiscal nightmare may be a harbinger of things to come for American cities. In the mid-’90s, local governments embarked on a spending binge, bringing total municipal debt in the United States to more than $2.8 trillion. Along with Harrisburg, Jefferson County, Alabama, Vallejo, California, and Central Falls, Rhode Island have filed for bankruptcy in the past few years. Several more cities are on the brink of default, largely thanks to taxpayer-financed stadiums, museums, housing, commercial complexes, other misconceived economic development projects, and runaway public sector salaries, pensions, and benefit packages.
Few cities can top Harrisburg’s recklessness when it comes to spending and borrowing.
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Simply appalling. Why is the concept of spending within your means so foreign to some politicians? For that matter, why is the concept of “do no harm” even more foreign to them?
Simple.
Dems are not here to help. They are here to gain power and control over all of your misguided decisions. Once they have that control things will be wonderful. You just have no faith.
That mayor deserves a statue … in his planned, but never built Museum of Mayors and Gum Ball Machines.
So what have we learned here? Mayor Reed took a “dead” city made a record $610 million debt and made it deader. How unbelievably stupid. How did that man last 28years? Voters really are stupid sheep.
This is why term limits have to be written into law for all elected positions, not just the U.S. presidency.
Term limits will only work with severe lobbying reform. Otherwise, the junior pols will be preyed upon by big business, etc at OUR expense. And repeated every election.
I see scary parallels to Obama policies here! I could see Barry building a stadium, buying a team, hotel, or even an entire industry… And “An incinerator that was supposed to make money”- that smells like every scheme Obama has cooked up so far! Even Obama-care was going to save us money- but now we need to tax the rich!
Is it a coincidence that the worst cities are the ones that have been run by liberals the longest? They have the most expensive housing, thanks to rent control, crime, boarded up buildings etc.
Where is the promised utopia?