The financial rock slide that will eventually bury the state of California has begun.
A Reuters article reports “Two years after Vallejo, California, filed for bankruptcy protection, officials in nearby Antioch are also tossing around the ‘B’ word. Antioch’s leaders earlier this month said bankruptcy could be an option for the cash-strapped city of roughly 100,000 on the eastern fringe of the San Francisco Bay area. Antioch’s fiscal woes are standard issue for local governments in California: weak revenue from retail sales and property taxes is forcing spending cuts, layoffs and furloughs. But cost-cutting measures may not be enough to keep Antioch’s books balanced, so its city council is openly discussing bankruptcy. ‘We just want to alert people to the possibility,’ Antioch Mayor Pro Tem Mary Helen Rocha said.”
California is rapidly changing from a White state to a Third World state. Illegal aliens cost California $13.1 billion dollars per year. The highly productive and creative White people who made California the wealthiest state in the nation, are being driven out by ever increasing taxes and being replaced by Mexicans, Asians, Hindus and Pakis. The resulting heavily multi-racial state is not stronger due to its diversity. It is weaker and teetering on bankruptcy.
The article notes “Orange County Treasurer Chriss Street would not be surprised if more local governments across the Golden State sound a similar alarm. Street expects more talk of municipal bankruptcy across California because local government finances are in such dire shape — a situation underscored on Wednesday when a top finance officer for Sacramento County projected a worse-than-expected shortfall for the county of $181 million, which could force more than 1,000 layoffs from the county’s payroll.”
Municipalities all across the country are facing destitution due to an almost complete collapse in some places of the traditional sources of revenue, namely property taxes and retail sales taxes. When millions of people have been foreclosed and evicted from their homes, there is no one to pay property taxes. Technically speaking, the banks who have foreclosed and repossessed the homes should be liable to pay, but lots of luck to a town like Antioch in collecting taxes from some bank that has itself just been seized by the FDIC.
And in regards to retail sales, when people are unemployed and broke, they’re not exactly swarming into the shopping malls and buying up lots of nonessential stuff.
So where do municipalities get money for garbage collection, police and other government services when they fall short? Usually the state or sometimes the federal government bails them out. In view of the fact that the state of California itself is on the verge of bankruptcy there’s no chance of a state bail out.
If you live in Antioch, California, better hope you don’t get robbed or your house doesn’t catch on fire. You may call 911 and get sent to voice mail.
