Archive for the 'Your tax dollars at work – and play.' Category
12th December 2016
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Of course. You don’t keep records for a slush fund.
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12th December 2016
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Don’t see why — they can just make up new climate change data the way they made up the last set.
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11th December 2016
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Hint: It was a scam to buy more votes from the SWPL crowd.
Back in January, President Obama asked Congress to set aside $4 billion for computer science education, in what would have been the federal government’s largest targeted funding for promoting the subject in schools. The proposal seemed designed to generate more headlines than actual funding — and now, nearly a year down the road, that largely seems to be what’s happened.
Not mentioned: The threshold question of What business is it of the Federal government to spend money on computer education?
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on What Happened to Obama’s $4 Billion in Computer Science Funding?
11th December 2016
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The reason why there’s a “consensus” that climate change is happening is because it’s such a huge career detriment for a scientist to be skeptical of global warming. The E.P.A. spends billions of dollars a year on climate change research and the research money only goes to scientists who believe (or claim to believe) in climate change.
Once Trump controls the E.P.A., he can redirect the billions of dollars to research skeptical of climate change. And suddenly, overnight, we will see large numbers of skeptical scientists appear out of nowhere and there will no longer be a “consensus.”
Follow the money.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
11th December 2016
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A sensible approach would be for the federal government to take the lead in rebalancing America’s allocation of population and resources by taking a good hard look at whether so much federal activity needs to be concentrated in Washington, DC, and its suburbs. Moving agencies out of the DC area to the Midwest would obviously cause some short-term disruptions. But in the long run, relocated agencies’ employees would enjoy cheaper houses, shorter commutes, and a higher standard of living, while Midwestern communities would see their population and tax base stabilized and gain new opportunities for complementary industries to grow.
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10th December 2016
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Last week the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government could not be held financially responsible for issuing erroneous warnings about the source of an outbreak of foodborne illness that caused the loss of millions of dollars of tomatoes.
The warnings, issued by the FDA in 2008, turned out to be wildly inaccurate and deeply damaging.
Government employees routinely take actions that would put private actors in jail or cost them huge fines. And yet they skate — nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Tomato Growers Lose Millions Thanks to False FDA Warning, Courts’ Failure to Act
8th December 2016
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The SWPL chickens come home to roost.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Senate Dems Scramble After Report Shows [That] the Most ‘Diverse’ Staff Is Actually Republican
8th December 2016
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Sure, open up the border! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?
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8th December 2016
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And the hits just keep on comin’….
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Los Angeles Public Schools Create Hotline for Students Upset About Trump
8th December 2016
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The city of Port Angeles, Washington spent $107,516 putting up wind turbines in a new city park. The turbines will power 31 lights in the park. This will save the taxpayers of Port Angeles a whopping $41.58 per month.
That’s before subtracting operating costs, though no one yet knows how much it will cost to operate them. The city is in a dispute with the manufacturer, so it will be another month or so before they turn them on.
Washington state is the northern province of Left Coast Ecotopia, so it’s a glaring example of politically-motivated ‘environmentalism’ that underscores the Thatcher proverb ‘the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
8th December 2016
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Texas spends $275 million a year on a vehicle inspection program and has never bothered to find out if it makes the public safer or healthier.
The Lone Star State isn’t alone. None of the other 14 states with vehicle safety inspections could provide the Government Accountability Office with any evidence justifying the existence of the programs.
Sounds like the perfect government program.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 2 Comments »
8th December 2016
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Nobody is in charge at the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) Board of Governors after today when the last Senate-confirmed governor’s term expires, leaving Postmaster General Megan Brennan and Deputy Postmaster Ronald Stroman large and in charge, with no oversight.
Not that ‘oversight’ of the Post Office ever did anybody any good. There’s a reason the Post Office has entered American folklore as the poster child for bureaucracy, inefficiency, and incompetence.
The number of governors on the postal board has dwindled as nobody has been appointed to new terms since 2010. Former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has blocked multiple presidential appointments to the board, according to outgoing governor James Bilbray, a former Democratic congressman from Nevada. Meanwhile, the USPS’s deficit reached $5.6 billion this year.
This is the first I’ve ever heard of Bernie objecting to people being employed by the government. I doubt that the USPS’s deficit bothered him a microsecond.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Post Office’s Governing Board Is Empty, And It’s Bernie’s Fault
6th December 2016
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Jordan, who has repeatedly called for Koskinen’s impeachment, said the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS is unacceptable. He said Koskinen’s role in the scandal warrants impeachment proceedings.
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Obama’s IRS Commissioner Faces Impeachment Vote in Congress
6th December 2016
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A wind turbine that’s part of the first U.S. offshore wind farm broke down before the site started commercially producing power.
Yeah, those ‘renewables’ are really dependable. (NOT)
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on 1st US Offshore Wind Turbine Breaks Before It Even Opened for Business
6th December 2016
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The employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act requires businesses with more than 50 full-time employees must provide health care for at least 95 percent of the employees and dependents up to age 26, or pay a fee.
Katz told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that that between his two restaurants in Fort Worth and Dallas, he has more than 50 employees. Because he doesn’t provide health care to his staff, starting Jan. 1, he will face a penalty between $200,000 and $300,000.
“I don’t have that kind of money,” Katz told the Star-Telegram. “Instead of 50 or 60 people without healthcare, we have 50 or 60 people that aren’t employed anymore. It makes no sense.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Texas Restaurant Closes, and the Owner Is Blaming Obamacare
5th December 2016
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Where’s the enthusiasm for the President ruling by decree now? They were all for it when the Magic Negro was in power.
The problem with an Imperial Presidency is that anybody can do it.
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2nd December 2016
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He must have seen a film of the Iraqis torching the oil wells in Kuwait as they were being hammerd out and said, ‘Hey, I can do that to America!’
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on REPORT: Obama Rushes $44 Billion Worth of Regs Before Leaving Office
30th November 2016
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All of which is coming out of YOUR pockets. Aren’t you proud?
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 2 Comments »
29th November 2016
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What must it be like to be someone dumber than a journalist, or even a Congressman, who can so easily see that these are a waste of money?
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Smell Museums, Feminist Glaciers, and 7 Other Embarrassing Cases of Federal Waste
28th November 2016
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Six government appointees, including the son of a vice president, who negotiated how much public money would be spent building the Minnesota Vikings’ new football stadium get free access to luxury boxes for all events in the stadium.
Which, you know, might call into question how hard they really negotiated for the taxpayers on that one.
Bet they were Democrats.
Maybe the best part of the story is the moment when two members of the MSFA board (chairwoman Michele Kelm-Helgen and executive director Ted Mondale) try to justify their sweet, free, and secret perk by arguing that they “work long hours on game days and spent long nights negotiating on behalf of taxpayers during construction of the building, so having friends and family there is reasonable.”
Mondale, by the way, is the son of former U.S. vice president Walter Mondale and he has lived the life of a vice president’s son. After a brief stint in elected office during the 1990s, he’s settled into a rotating set of political appointments. He was appointed to the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council by Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1999, and he used that post to push for the approval of a pair of ridiculously expensive light rail lines. With that public boondoggle in his resume, he was probably a natural fit on the MSFA board, to which he was named CEO by Gov. Mark Dayton in 2012, just as the new stadium deal was in the works.
Looks perfectly Crustian to me. What’s the use of having power if you can’t abuse it?
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 2 Comments »
25th November 2016
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Of all the problems that dominate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only one ensures that the conflict will never end: the growth in the number of Arab-Palestinian refugees. Western governments have enabled this industry.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 4 Comments »
24th November 2016
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23rd November 2016
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Four black individuals have now been charged in the brutal beating of a Chicago man, all while clearly shouting “white boy” and “he voted Trump,” yet none of them will be charged with hate crimes.
There’s your racist ‘justice’ in Barack Obama’s America.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on No Hate Crime Charges Against Anti-Trump Attackers in Chicago
23rd November 2016
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Wisconsin school officials who are bullying a 6-year-old boy. His offense? Bringing to school the latest book in the bestselling children’s book series on American history, “Adventures of Rush Revere,” written by Rush Limbaugh (with his wife Kathryn). The book, just published, is Rush Revere and the Presidency.
As Matt, the boy’s father, explained to Vicki during her November 18 afternoon (Madison) show, school officials in Marshall, Wisconsin, regard anything written by Rush Limbaugh as “inappropriate material” — even though the series has received rave reviews, and Rush won the 2013 “Author of the Year” award at the Children’s Choice Book Awards, for his first book in the series.
This is what ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ looks like in Barack Obama’s America.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Rush Limbaugh Children’s Books Banned at Wisconsin School: They’re “Inappropriate”
21st November 2016
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Compare with today’s bloviating.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on In 2006, These Democrats Still in Office Voted to Build a Wall
21st November 2016
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When Denver’s new airport rail line experienced severe glitches shortly after it opened, including malfunctioning crossing gates and a lightning strike that shut down the entire line for seven hours, among other problems, transit officials assured the public that they were just getting the bugs out of the system. But now, more than six months after it opened, the bugs are still thriving.
The crossing gate problem is so severe that the Federal Transit Administration has threatened to shut down the line until it is corrected. The contractor that built and operates the line tried to claim the lightning strike was an act of God, so the contractor shouldn’t be held responsible, but Regional Transit District officials responded that they had pointed out the company’s design was vulnerable to lightning as early as 2013, yet the company did nothing to fix the flaw. Meanwhile, the system continues to perform unreliably.
What is it with Democrats and trains? Why do they insist on living in the past?
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Still Unreliable After All These Months
19th November 2016
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
19th November 2016
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Looks like the whitest city in America just can’t get it right.
The Census Bureau estimates that the city of Portland is growing by more than 10,000 people a year while the Portland urban area is growing by more than 40,000 people a year, or more than 100 people a day. Despite, or more likely because of, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on growth planning, the region is doing a very poor job of producing the housing those people need to live in.
Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, brags that not only is the region following most of the advice recently offered by the White House for making housing more affordable, it actually pioneered several of the techniques. Yet according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Portland-area housing prices are currently growing at 13 percent per year.
Perhaps that’s because ‘most of the advice recently offered by the White House’ is just a load of crap?
That’s my guess, what’s your guess?
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Portland: Still the Model for Unaffordability
19th November 2016
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At last! Somebody who gets it.
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15th November 2016
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Environmental regulators in Wyoming say water contamination previously blamed on fracking was instead “almost certainly” caused by the EPA.
Anti-fracking activists repeatedly cited the plight of Pavillion, Wyo., as proof the process should be banned. EPA investigators accidentally drilled their own monitoring wells incorrectly, introducing the contaminants which were later detected in water samples. The agency followed this up by openly theorizing that fracking was to blame for the contamination.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Contamination Blamed on Fracking Was ‘Almost Certainly’ Caused by EPA
15th November 2016
Read it. Before you believe the sky-is-falling headlines.
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15th November 2016
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This is a Very Bad Idea.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 2 Comments »
11th November 2016
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on All the Money Obama Borrowed From Taxpayers, In One Chart
8th November 2016
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A U.S. Marine Corps F-35B burst into flames mid-flight Oct. 27, causing more than $2 million in damage to the aircraft.
Further evidence that the F-35 is a flying piece of shit.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on America’s $400 Billion Plane Spontaneously Combusts Mid-Flight
8th November 2016
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Over the past few decades, ordinary US citizens have increasingly been denied effective access to their courts. There are many reasons for this. One is the ever greater cost of hiring a lawyer. A second factor is the increased expense, apart from legal fees, that a litigant must pay to pursue a lawsuit to conclusion. A third factor is increased unwillingness of lawyers to take a case on a contingent-fee basis when the anticipated monetary award is modest. A fourth factor is the decline of unions and other institutions that provide their members with free legal representation. A fifth factor is the imposition of mandatory arbitration. A sixth factor is judicial hostility to class action suits. A seventh factor is the increasing diversion of legal disputes to regulatory agencies. An eighth factor, in criminal cases, is the vastly increased risk of a heavy penalty in going to trial.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Why You Won’t Get Your Day in Court
8th November 2016
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A United Nations legislative body has voted to kick journalists out of its meeting Monday.
Delegates voted unanimously to ban journalists from the remaining sessions of the biennial legislative conference of World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).
Journalists called the decision “outrageous” and “shocking,” while delegates refused to address concerns about denying press freedom.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Reporters Banned From Global Anti-Tobacco Conference
7th November 2016
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Barely two weeks after the US Navy commissioned its newest and most futuristic warship, armed with two huge guns that can hit targets 80 miles away, the service is moving to cancel the projectiles for the guns, citing excessive costs that run up to $800,000 per round or more.
The Long Range Land-Attack Projectile (LRLAP) is a guided precision munition that is key to the DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class’s mission as a land-attack destroyer, able to hit targets with such accuracy that, in the words of manufacturer Lockheed Martin, can “defeat targets in the urban canyons of coastal cities with minimal collateral damage.”
The LRLAP is the only munition designed to be fired from the DDG 1000’s Advanced Gun System (AGS), a 155mm/62-caliber gun with an automated magazine and handling system. Each of the three Zumwalts will carry two of the guns – the largest weapons to be designed for and fitted on a warship since World War II.
But the LRLAP’s unit price has jumped steadily as the numbers of Zumwalt-class destroyers were cut. From a total of 28 ships, to seven, and finally to three, the class shrank and costs did not.
“We were going to buy thousands of these rounds,” said a Navy official familiar with the program. “But quantities of ships killed the affordable round.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on New Warship’s Big Guns Have No Bullets
7th November 2016
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Cut off one head, two shall grow in its place….
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7th November 2016
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If you’re a kid in Beaverton, Oregon, you may wonder why your mom never says, “Go to the library.”
Maybe it’s because mom has something else to do today other than watch you like a hawk.
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5th November 2016
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
5th November 2016
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BLUF: More than you’ll ever see.
Of course, if he sets up a family foundation and ropes Michelle in on the deal, the sky’s the limit.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
4th November 2016
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3rd November 2016
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The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
…
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
The Crust exposed.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Forget the FBI Cache; the Podesta Emails Show How America Is Run
3rd November 2016
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United Nations peacekeepers did not intervene in July to stop South Sudanese soldiers from raping and murdering Western aid workers, a new UN report finds.
“During the attack, civilians were subjected to and witnessed gross human rights violations, including murder, intimidation, sexual violence and acts amounting to torture perpetrated by armed government soldiers,” the report states. The aid workers and staff called for help from UN peacekeepers stationed less than a mile a way, but received no assistance.
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3rd November 2016
Steve Sailer follows this stuff so that you don’t have to.
People like to obfuscate that race is incredibly complicated and who can say etc etc … But in my experience, having followed public discourse on race fairly carefully since 1972, whatever the government says typically wins out. If the government gives out money and prizes for identifying as X but not for identifying as Y, then over time more people will identify as X even if, deep down, they feel like they are Z.
This suggests that federal guidelines on racial boundaries are extremely important, but nobody seems interested in the subject other than special interests.
…
The Obama Administration is likely to soon announce that another sizable group has been granted the privilege of Nonwhiteness.
…
If the Obama Administration goes through with this, virtually every Muslim in the United States (except for that poor guy from Bosnia who got hammered to death in St. Louis by a NAM mob in revenge for Michael Brown) will be officially nonwhite.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on If The Census Adds a MENA Category, That Will Facilitate White Identity Politics
3rd November 2016
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When the Antiplanner spoke in Norfolk two years ago, my opening line was “They should call it lie rail because everything about light rail is a lie.” The proponents of building light rail in Virginia Beach have certainly proven that to be true.
Above is an advertisement for the ballot measure. In addition to saying, “Reduce Traffic Congestion,” which it won’t do, it says, “Connect the Oceanfront, ODU [Old Dominion University], Airport & Naval Base.” Yet the ballot measure proposes to increase local property taxes to build a three-mile, $300 million light-rail line that won’t go to any of those places. They say they have long-term plans to build extensions to those places, but they also say that don’t plan to come back and ask for more tax increases.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on This Is Why They Call It “Lie Rail”
3rd November 2016
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The IRS scandal never ended, because the behavior never stopped. More importantly, the structural forces that nurtured it—piqued politicians demanding agencies “do something” in accord with political objectives, and like-minded, eager-to-please career employees manning those agencies—means a repeat is not just predictable, it’s inevitable. In fact, it may already be occurring.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Despite Investigations, Obama’s IRS Has Never Stopped Targeting Conservatives
28th October 2016
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Like the victims in any good horror film, officials in Dallas, Texas, find themselves in a situtation that was entirely avoidable—if only they’d realized it before it was too late.
In 2005, Dallas issued a $500 million bond that was supposed to plug the leaks in its police and fire pension system.
Now, just more than a decade later, the city is scrambling to prevent a “run on the bank” that’s threatening to bankrupt the pension system before 2028. By one count, more than $200 million was withdrawn from the system in less than six weeks as Dallas’ police and firefighters are making a run for it—yanking their investments out of the system that’s teetering on the edge of collapse.
As with all big cities in Texas, Dallas is (and always has been) run by Democrats.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Nightmare In Deep Ellum: How Pension Obligation Bonds Ruined Dallas Employees’ Retirement Dreams
28th October 2016
Read it. And by all means watch the video.
A rotund raccoon’s curiosity got the better of him after he got stuck head first in an Army tank, a YouTube video posted Thursday shows.
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28th October 2016
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I predict that Obama’s response will be ‘Suck it’.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Sailor Petition Forces White House Review of Navy’s Unpopular Ratings Elimination