The Public Pension Time Bomb: Coming Soon to a State Near You, plus the Bypass to Nowhere

Yep, just me again harping on what our County Commission has done to this county by saddling us with a HUGE problem sometime down the road.  I saw the article I posted below and it stirred me up again!

I think it is the height of irresponsibility for the commission to have opened their arms to embrace this ticking financial time bomb.

Tell me, if you saw everyone around you going into bankruptcy because they invested in a certain stock or annuity or whatever, would you raise your hands and say "ooohh, me too, me too, I want that"? That's just what the guys in office did...

You may not think it's a big deal now, but if you stick around long enough in this county you will. Grrrr... it's just one of the things the current Board has enacted that is giving me heartburn. 

If you can get past the arrogance of the decision to put in the un-needed pension plan change, how about that bypass to nowhere? The STOPPED the East bypass, tossing all the money invested into that one into the trash so they could build a road that goes nowhere... YET. It's gonna go right by their developer friend's land... 

It wasn't on the priority list. It did NOT have to be done. There were other projects that were given a much higher priority in past studies yet they did that project.

Ya know, they also moved it so that it split people's property, took people's property, ruined their beautiful homes. For what? It's not going to help traffic in any shape or form except for the teeny, tiny part that goes right around the hospital. 

It's frivolous, UNLESS you start looking at who owns land down their.

Something that has crossed my mind, but it's a thought, not anything that I can say I know --- Jack Smith has been working hard to get a county industrial park stuck somewhere. I know they rezoned to allow one already, but it's not county. I have been wondering if this switch of road priorities doesn't include a future industrial park. Like I said, it's just a thought. 

Alright, I'm done ;-)

The Public Pension Time Bomb: Coming Soon to a State Near You


In this age of fiscal sophistry, the language of public finance is riddled with economic alchemy. The federal government moves $877 billion from Washington's coffers to those of its most favored interest groups and calls it "stimulus." The Speaker of the House declares that unemployment benefits serve as "one of the biggest stimuleses [sic] to our economy" - a perverse formulation by which growth is contingent on impoverished Americans spending what little money they have as quickly as possible. Even President Obama's fiscally reckless health care entitlement is sold as an "investment" that will produce "long-term savings."

But what each of these polices lack in economic sensibility they make up for in reversibility. No such luxury presents itself in the case of the nation's public pensions, which are perilously close to creating a fiscal doomsday unlike anything the nation has ever seen.

Read more now.