Every year at Annual Town Meeting, we pass an article that authorizes the Treasurer with the approval of the Selectmen to borrow in anticipation of revenue to meet short-term cash needs. In all the years I've been going to TM, this has been controversial once, when some bad feeling spilled over from another article. But what if there were no loans to be had?
The town would miss payroll, furlough workers, and wait for liquid tax receipts to come in. The suddenly unemployed workers would tighten their belts, and you can bet they wouldn't pay their taxes on time.
The private sector is even more sensitive to the absence of credit. Its ex-employees would be holding onto every dime, too.
Writ large, California is already in this situation.
State Treasurer Bill Lockyer issued a statement a day earlier saying because of the national financial crisis, California "has been locked out of credit markets for the past 10 days."The crisis is picking up speed, and that's not good. When the Bushists tell me the sky is falling, I'm skeptical. But they aren't the only people pulling fire alarms these days.
4 comments:
Let all those uber-rich, liberal Hollywood actors and actresses bail out their State. They should put their money where their mouth is.
I'd prefer to send the bill to yammerheads who make comments like anonymous 11:40.
Here's the "logic": Hey, California has lots of illegal aliens, too. Let them pay the bill. Wait, California has professional athletes. Let Manny RamÃrez and his buddies pay. Napa Valley and places all over are filled with wineries. They should discount their wine for us so we don't notice the California credit need. LA doesn't appreciate art. Sell the Getty's collection. Speaking of selling, who needs universities. Wouldn't a private company run them better? Sell them, too.
Or maybe Ahnuld can afford to float the loan himself from among his conservative Hollywood friends.
Oh, bullshit.
The concept might not be sound, but the sentiment is understandable. People are angry. Our country is being openly stolen from us. Americans contacted their representatives in droves and told them NO, and our elected officials, our employees, ignored us. And we can't even tell them, "Next election, you're fired." The only choices we'll have to replace them are clones.
--Another Anonymous
Yes, the sentiment is understandable, but the time of theft is long ago, when Republicans and many Democrats were saying we should dump the successful regulatory regime that FDR put in place. Many if not most Americans were happy to go along with carefully scripted lies that Wall St. would make Main St. rich, when that was obviously not the real concern at all.
But what we face now is not the desire to help the fatcats. It's the need to prevent another terrible depression. The last one meant 30% unemployment, worldwide economic disaster, the rise of extreme ideologies left and right, and more than a decade of full mobilization to war. A lot of us ordinary people got killed and hurt by that.
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