Cash and Carry: No Credit

The Governor of Cally phone ya has ordered (again) that all qualified state employees will be paid the state's minimum wage until the legislature passes a budget. Again, the state treasurer says he will not comply because people cannot live on minimum wage, but if there is no budget, there is no money, so earning something is better than getting nothing. Once the budget impasse is resolved, the employees will get back pay, but in the meanwhile, good luck with paying the monthly bills!

Another reporter interviewed a woman whose taxes have gone down significantly because her home no longer is worth the assessment on it, so she applied to have her taxes adjusted accordingly. She encourages everyone to apply on line: it's so easy and just takes a couple of minutes. She's so happy that she's going to be paying about half of what her taxes were 2 years ago that she wants everyone to follow her lead ... but does anyone understand what that really means?

Cities, towns, suburbs, inner cities, rural areas, retirement communities: everyone is seeing the aftermath of the real estate implosion. Yes, no one has a property worth what it was a couple of years ago, but all government agencies have increased salaries, services, and benefits based on the tax base from the prosperous years. Now that real estate is being devalued and the tax liability is being halved, there is LIMITED TAX REVENUE to pay the bills.

IF the average annual wage of a state employee is $36,000, that employee earns approximately $3000 a month -- which, at my current tax rate, will take my property taxes and 2 other like property owners' taxes to provide. If our taxes go down, we'll have to use the revenue from more property owners to pay the salary of one state employee. Even in a small city, such as the one where I live, there are about 250 state employees, plus the offices, the vehicles, the supplies and material to maintain the city -- and the phones and the utilities and all the other thousands of ways that government agencies spend money. The cost of my local government cannot be supported solely by the property taxes collected in the community, especially now that so many properties have gone into foreclosure and/or have been devalued, which lowers the tax liability and, by extension, the tax revenue.

Yes, there are other taxes that provide revenue to the state aside from property taxes, but people are not spending money as they were a year ago, which means that sales' tax revenue has declined, gas tax has declined, vehicle registration revenue has declined, and the list goes on and on and on.

It amazes me that so many people believe that the government has the money not just to keep the doors open, but to expand the free programs, hire the currently unemployed people, and provide premier services without costing anyone a dime. We are so disconnected from the reality of living on what we earn, rather than borrowing what we think we're going to earn next year, that I cannot see a way to change the perception of it's all free short of a total collapse of our current system and a rebuilding based on cash in hand. Our government centers are going to look like our neighborhoods, with plywood covering the windows, landscaping withering, and vagrants living in the vacant buildings of a vast concrete wasteland.