Interesting how this AP story makes it seem like Chicago’s 2009 city budget is really cutting costs and streamlined.
Aldermen have approved Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s $6.2 billion budget amid worries over the economy.
The budget, approved 49-1 on Wednesday, calls for as many as 635 layoffs, selling city assets and new fees and taxes.
It requires the hiring of fewer police officers, but stipulates that no officers or firefighters will lose their jobs. The city also won’t fill 1,600 vacant positions.
My guess is dishonesty on the part of the city and journalistic laziness on the part of the AP.
Still, one alderman – my old one, in fact – voted against it. Hot damn! Was it because the alderman in question pierced through the charade, the misrepresentation, and wanted to stand up for the taxpayer? No. No, he was protesting the severity of the “cuts”.
Alderman Billy Ocasio cast the lone dissenting vote. He says most of the layoffs affect “people who do the work and get paid the least.”
Wow. Usually, collectivists like to shroud their redistribution rhetoric, typically in dishonest, relationally-inverse-from-what’s-really-going-on terms (i.e. create jobs, more tax cuts for the rich, etc).
Lots of quote-gems here for the McCain campaign. I can’t imagine some scaled-down version of this one will go unnoticed.
The tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community-organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.
On July 16, Americans mark the national Cost of Government Day (COGD), the date on the calendar year when the average American finishes paying off his or her share of federal, state and local spending, and the regulatory burden. Cost of Government Day falling on July 16 means that you had to work 197 days out of the year just to meet all the costs imposed by government. In other words, the total cost of government – far more than taxation alone – consumes 53.9 percent of national income.
The burden imposed by government has increased in recent years, leading this year’s Cost of Government Day to be four days later than last year’s COGD, and sixteen days later than COGD in 2000. The looming entitlement crisis will only exacerbate the problem of government consuming more of the national income and, if left unchecked, will move Cost of Government even later into the year.
For a state-by-state breakdown, click here. My home state, Illinois, is 35th. Wah, wah, wah…
Really, I have a faint memory of Newt and, like most people, associate the Contract with America with him but that’s about it. It’s a memory with positive undertones though. Like the Ali G video articulated, there was welfare reform. And term limits. A balanced budget. All of which I consider good legislation…and Newt was leading it!
However, in the last week, I’ve randomly come across some items-articles, blogs-that dispute this positive association.
Big ups to Subtle as a Sledgehammer for sending me this link, an NPR article with an excellent excerpt from Ron Paul’s bestselling The Revolution: A Manifesto (which I will in turn pathetically excerpt) in which he briefly critiques the ‘Contract’:
a toothless, soporific agenda called the Contract with America that was boldly touted as a major overhaul of the federal government. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Contract with America was typical of what I have just described: no fundamental questions are ever raised, and even supposedly radical and revolutionary measures turn out to be modest and safe. In fact, the Brookings Institution in effect said that if this is what conservatives consider revolutionary, then they have basically conceded defeat.
I know, not much substance but I thought I’d link to it anyway.
Tennessee Cottonmouth gets more into it, giving Newt a scathing indictment based on his reaction to Bob Barr’s presidential announcement here (copied below):
Look at the former House Speaker presuming to lecture Bob Barr on the danger a robust Libertarian Party presidential candidacy poses for Freedom and Pursuit of Happiness in America.
“Bob Barr will make it marginally easier for Barack Obama to become president. That outcome threatens every libertarian value Barr professes to champion,” jabbered Gingrich a couple days ago in the Washington Times upon recieving word that the former Republican Barr is officially pursuing the LP nomination in Denver next week, and if successful will likely be kicking John McCain square in the musty folds of his crotch all summer long.
Let’s be clear: Newt Gingrich has never been an ally of anything or anyone remotely libertarian, and for him to even mouth an understanding of what motivates adherents of the Freedom Philosophy to believe the way they do is an act of stark profanation capable of inducing waves of emises. Newt Gingrich is a quintessential right-wing progressive interventionist who’s got a fundamental ax to grind — like the left-wing progressive interventionists he loathes culturally and admires ethically — against all things pro-individualist and anti-statist. Newt’s ideological rallying yawp, like that of John McCain and, indeed, the Democrats, is “Subordinate Your Life and Happiness to Patriotism, Collectivism and Government’s Divination of the ‘Common Good.’”
Newt, of course, is one of the chief Republican nitwits responsible a decade or so ago for purposefully derailing the party’s mildly libertarian-leaning “Contract With America” — the electorate’s November 1994 embrace of which helped the Stupid Party roll back Democrats into the congressional minority for the first time in roughly an eon.
Whew. For a second there, there almost wasn’t going to be a ‘most ridiculous statement’ for the month of March. But, then, Free Liberal put up the following video interview with Senator Harry Reid. It’s amazing. Amazing!
Our Senate Majority Leader stresses repeatedly that taxation is voluntary.
“Well, I don’t accept your phraseology. I don’t think we force people…our system of government is a voluntary kind of system.”
Yes. You head it right. Taxation is voluntary.
Haha. Voluntary! Oh man, that’s rich.
I didn’t think it was possible but it’s better than February’s ‘most ridiculous’. For those of you that don’t remember it was Deborah Sims, Cook County Commissioner (D-Chicago), arguing that “This country was built on taxes.”
A false empirical claim
Senator Reid’s comment, on the other hand, is false by definition.
More! What up with that?
