Posted on 04/18/2013 6:34:17 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In 2010 the nation learned that the city manager and council members of Bell, CA were abusing their public positions and improperly giving themselves pay increases.
The city manager had increased his public salary to nearly $800K a year. The police chief also managed to work himself up to a salary of over $400K a year. When local residents, who pay for these salaries, began to complain, the first response of the government employees was to cut back on town meetings. They refused to meet with townspeople or listen to their valid complaints.
And unlike the heads of huge corporations with outrageous salaries, the city manager has the authority to force local residents to pay his salary through their property taxes. Corporate executives do not have the power to extort salaries through the threat to seize homes. This threat lies behind the ability of local government employees to tax property, which has become the primary source of public sector union wages and pensions. And local taxpayers have virtually no say in either the amount their homes are taxed or the terms of public union contracts. These are all inside deals given to the biggest campaign contributors and the most closely connected politicians and their families.
The city manager of Bell, CA is not unique. School boards and county tax assessors across the nation gleefully raised property taxes during the housing value boom of 1995-2008. But since 2007 as housing prices have drastically declined, property taxes have not declined but gone up faster than ever. The Tax Foundation reports that from 2005 to 2010 property taxes in the entire U.S. increased an average of 27 percent. And while facing higher property tax bills, middle class Americans lost 39 percent of their wealth from 2007 to 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
#2
Like the old saying...
Why do professional athletes date supermodels and porn stars?
Well said. Of course, anyone who thinks the same situation exists at the state and/or national level is “kooky”.
Switch to Opera v12.15. Stop using IE; unpin from Task Bar, and just let it languish on Start Menu. You can import all BMs etc from IE into Opera.
Confused?
I hope this helps!
I become confused when I hear the word “Service” used with these agencies:
Internal Revenue ‘Service’, US Postal ‘Service’ , Telephone ‘Service’ ,
Cable TV ‘Service’ , Civil ‘Service’, Federal, State, City, & public ‘Service’
Customer ‘Service’
This is NOT what I thought ‘Service’ meant. But today, I overheard two ranchers talking, and one of them said he had bought a bull to ‘Service’ his cows.
BAM!!! It all came into focus. Now I understand what all those agencies are doing to us.
You are now as enlightened as I .
The problem is only at this FreeRepublic.com site. No place else do I have the problem.
The HTTP-500 problem is only at this FreeRepublic.com site. No place else do I have the problem.
Ditto that.
“Remote server or file not found”
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