Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Pay more, get less

The subway isn't the only place where you'll be paying more and getting less.

The city and state governments plan to charge you higher taxes, more fees and bigger tolls - even issue you more parking tickets - to bridge the money gap.

In return, expect the government to do less for you - fewer road repairs and trash pickups, fewer cops on the street, fewer fire engines at night.

This is the brutal math facing New Yorkers as government copes with enormous budget shortfalls in the coming years.


We face more taxes and tickets, less service

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

wonder if ever occurred to them to cut spending.

Anonymous said...

Bend over America! The great fuckover of the sheeple is just beginning. We will be the victims of the greatest scams in the history of the USA.

Unknown said...

Depressing... we haven't even factored in the 700 billion bail out package to any of the future taxes owed.

Anonymous said...

Isn't it strange that any system that's overseen by politicians is a complete disfunctioning disaster.

Our public schools.....worthless.
NYC.....couldn't be more wasteful.
NY State....bankrupt.
MTA....pay more, get less.
Public housing.....a war zone.

This list is endless.

Anything a politician touches turns to complete crap.

Anonymous said...

Here's an idea. Why doesn't Mayor Bloomberg forget about New York being a sanctuary city and stop giving illegals free medical, food stamps and safe haven. Cut off the illegals and they will return to their mother countries with their anchor children. These people are a drain on our economy and maybe this will free up money that we don't have to pay out of pocket.

georgetheatheist said...

Read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The handwriting is definitely on the wall.

www.aynrand.org
www.nra.org

Anonymous said...

Read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The handwriting is definitely on the wall.
Hmmm?The cult of Rand again.

stunned that this man who preaches the doctrine of personal responsibility refuses to take any at all.

Yet ideological contradictions are only relevant if Greenspan really is a true believer. I'm not convinced. Greenspan writes that as a student he had no interest in big ideas. Unlike his classmates who were in the thrall of Keynesianism, with its promise of building a better world, Greenspan was simply good at math. He started doing research for powerful corporations; it was profitable, but Greenspan made no claims to a higher social contribution.
Then he discovered Ayn Rand. "What she did…was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," he said in 1974.

Rand's ideas about the "utopia of greed" allowed Greenspan to keep doing what he was doing but infused his corporate service with a powerful new sense of mission: making money wasn't just good for him; it was good for society as a whole. Of course, the flip side of this is the cruel disregard for those left behind. "Undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment," Greenspan wrote as a zealous new convert. "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should." Was it this mindset that served him well as he supported shock therapy in Russia (72 million impoverished) and in East Asia after the 1997 economic crisis (24 million pushed into unemployment)?

Rand has played this role of greed enabler for countless disciples. According to the New York Times, Atlas Shrugged, her novel that ends with the hero tracing a dollar sign in the air like a benediction, stands as "one of the most influential business books ever written". Since Rand is simply pulped-up Adam Smith, her influence on men like Greenspan suggests an interesting possibility. Perhaps the true purpose of the entire literature of trickle-down theory is to liberate entrepreneurs to pursue their narrowest advantage while claiming global altruistic motives–not so much an economic philosophy as an elaborate, retroactive rationale.