We are headed for an oncoming financial train wreck. The engineer’s car is not manned by a wide-awake engineer with his hand on the brake watching the track ahead. It’s manned by crazed monkeys jumping from one spot to another, clueless that we’re about to run into something.
The New York Times reports: “California, New York and other states are showing many of the same signs of debt overload that recently took Greece to the brink — budgets that will not balance, accounting that masks debt, the use of derivatives to plug holes, and armies of retired public workers who are counting on benefits that are proving harder and harder to pay. And states are responding in sometimes desperate ways, raising concerns that they, too, could face a debt crisis. New Hampshire was recently ordered by its State Supreme Court to put back $110 million that it took from a medical malpractice insurance pool to balance its budget. Colorado tried, so far unsuccessfully, to grab a $500 million surplus from Pinnacol Assurance, a state workers’ compensation insurer that was privatized in 2002. It wanted the money for its university system and seems likely to get a lesser amount, perhaps $200 million.”
Apparently they’re getting so desperate that they are simply outright stealing from anyone in the private sector they can find who still has some money left.
The Times goes on: “Connecticut has tried to issue its own accounting rules. Hawaii has inaugurated a four-day school week. California accelerated its corporate income tax this year, making companies pay 70 percent of their 2010 taxes by June 15. And many states have balanced their budgets with federal health care dollars that Congress has not yet appropriated. California’s stated debt — the value of all its bonds outstanding — looks manageable, at just 8 percent of its total economy. But California has big unstated debts, too. If the fair value of the shortfall in California’s big pension fund is counted, for instance, the state’s debt burden more than quadruples, to 37 percent of its economic output, according to one calculation. The state’s economy will also be weighed down by the ballooning federal debt, though California does not have to worry about those payments as much as its taxpaying citizens and businesses do.”
I still think California will be the first to implode, although Illinois and New York are running neck and neck in a very close three-way race to bankruptcy.
If you need any more signs that we’re headed for financial disaster consider this: A Fox News article reports “President Obama signed a bill that he says will save hundreds of thousands of teacher and other public workers from unemployment. Obama signed the measure into law just hours after the House passed it in a special one-day session during what would normally be the lawmakers’ summer break. The $26 billion bill would protect 300,000 teachers, police and others from election-year layoffs. Obama and Democrats said quick action was necessary before children return to classrooms minus teachers laid off because of budgetary crises in states that have been hard-hit by the recession.”
Twelve billion of that $26 billion was taken from the Food Stamps program by the way. (And that money needs to be repaid or the Food Stamps program will run out of money next year. Is this starting to sound like a laid off yuppie shifting debt from one credit card to another?)
This is the first federal bail out of the states –if you don’t count extending unemployment benefits, and there was barely a peep about it in the news. No one is bothering to ask why states like California need to be bailed out, which once again brings us back to the illegal alien problem, not to mention bloated, overpaid state bureaucracies.
It’s coming, folks. The Big Meltdown. And it’s coming faster than anyone expects.
Right now the regime in Washington will be pulling out all the stops to make sure that everything remains on an even keel until after the November elections like the emergency $26 billion bail out. What happens when California or Illinois just plain runs out of money and no one will lend them any more?
I used to think there never would be any one big crash as the whole tottering edifice of American corruption, waste, incompetence and greed came tumbling down. Now I’m not so sure. I think 2011 is going to be a very fun year for White people to watch, even if it’s from under a bridge as we grill up a possum over a campfire.
