It looks like it's time to cut taxes for the rich again, that will solve this small problem.
SAN DIEGO — Fire departments around the nation are cutting jobs, closing firehouses and increasingly resorting to “rolling brownouts” in which they shut different fire companies on different days as the economic downturn forces many cities and towns to make deep cuts that are slowing their responses to fires and other emergencies.We can't afford protection against fires, but by God we can spend billions to bail out the "free market" banksters and that my friends is what really, really counts. God bless America, and the Teabagger party for which it stands.
Philadelphia began rolling brownouts this month, joining cities from Baltimore to Sacramento that now shut some units every day. San Jose, Calif., laid off 49 firefighters last month. And Lawrence, Mass., north of Boston, has laid off firefighters and shut down half of its six firehouses, forcing the city to rely on help from neighboring departments each time a fire goes to a second alarm
3 comments:
It would be interesting to see how the rates change for homeowners insurance. The insurance companies can't be happy about the additional risk. I wonder if the boost in rates will come close the tax increase that would provide full fire services?
Yup, and the people yelling the loudest for the cuts in budgets of fire, police and teachers will be the first in line to sue if their house burns down, their car gets stolen or their kid flunks jr. high.
Right-on UL! This just SO much reminds me of the old farmers' saying about "don't eat your seed-corn", which -- for you city-slickers -- essentially is a more colorful, pithy way of saying "don't dip into your savings unnecessarily". This country has been on a short-term binge-spending-spree essentially since the late 1970's. The savings rate declined to one of the lowest in the western European nations, we legalized lotteries all over the place, we put our neighbors (or sometimes ourselves) out of work so that we could buy cheap foreign goods (cause it's 'better' to have 3 pair of shoes made in China along with an unemployed neighbor than it is to have 1 pair with an employed, tax-paying neighbor) in a virulent anti-union place like Wal-Mart. And we can spend a trillion or two on a boutique-war, killing 1 million people in the process, in the laughable hope that we can somehow return to the cheap-oil days of the 1950's. It's pretty disgusting all-in-all...
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