Flint Citizens Want Snyder’S Head; Gov. Begs Obama For Help

[outsideinthecold]

Thank you for the historical insight into what happened. This sad pattern has been repeated in many other cities, large and small in Michigan and across the so-called rust belt.

 

Could the decline have been avoided? Not completely. But the lesson no one addresses is the municipal government's addiction to spending. Over spending, whether a population is growing, stagnant or declining, is still over spending.

 

Governments are by nature addicted to growth. Like most addictions, what starts rather benignly can unchecked spiral out of control.

 

Today it is Flint's turn. Tomorrow it will be Puerto Rico. Who saves Illinois?

 

We're doomed. Oh well.

[solabeirtan]

" Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially responsible for the harm that befell them. The study of victimology seeks to mitigate the perception of victims as responsible."
 
This state is being raped by the people elected by its poor unfortunate citizens and paid to oversee and protect it.
 
 Unfortunately for them they are not 'too big to fail'. Regrettably, the ones that got the help actually were the ones who really perpetuated their own destruction, threatening the safety and  security of an entire nation. Thereby holding it for ransom... yet instead of holding them responsible for their actions we (the victims) were not given a chance but robbed of our savings and equity built up in our most sacred possessions our own American Dreams the wealth we stored in our homes, our largest and most valuable possession. Worse yet is the fact that many of those you speak of have been systemically deprived of the privilege of accumulating wealth.

[beourbud]

President Obama needs to appoint an Emergency Manager for the State of Michigan.

 

The NERD is a Turd!

Edited January 19, 2016 by beourbud

[Restorium2]

Thank you for the historical insight into what happened. This sad pattern has been repeated in many other cities, large and small in Michigan and across the so-called rust belt.

 

Could the decline have been avoided? Not completely. But the lesson no one addresses is the municipal government's addiction to spending. Over spending, whether a population is growing, stagnant or declining, is still over spending.

 

Governments are by nature addicted to growth. Like most addictions, what starts rather benignly can unchecked spiral out of control.

 

Today it is Flint's turn. Tomorrow it will be Puerto Rico. Who saves Illinois?

 

We're doomed. Oh well.

[Restorium2]

When Dan Kildee was the was the head of the Genesee County Land Bank I had a discussion with him about Flint's problems. His take was that the biggest issue was that Flint's public infrastructure was built for a population of 250,000 residents. Now Flint has the task of maintaining that infrastructure for only 90,000 residents. So Flint now has the impossible task of maintaining streets, plowing snow, offering trash pickup, fire service, street lights. maintaining water and sewer lines, etc. for a population less than half the size of what was intended. This results in public services costing 2.5 times as much per capita as it should cost to serve the population. So we see a huge drop in tax value/huge drop in tax revenue but with the city still trying to provide necessary services. The tax revenue isn't a 1:1 drop based on the declining population. Even the people who remain in Flint pay far less in property tax proportionally. So it isn't as if a drop in population from 180,000 people to 90,000 people reduces the tax revenue by half. In other words, by the population being cut in half, the property tax revenue probably is cut by 75% because the folks who remain are paying far lower tax bills because the values of their properties have dropped much more than 50%

 

And to add insult to this injury, Flint also has to figure out how to deal with the costs of addressing blight, increased arson, illegal trash dumping, etc.

 

Growing up in Flint and living in the area my entire life, I've seen this first-hand. At one time, there were 70,000 GM jobs in the city. These were more than livable-wage jobs offered to unskilled workers with just a high school education but also awesome health benefits, the revenue of which was added to medical services in and around Flint. Add to that the exodus of retired GM workers. Most of the people who worked in Flint during the heyday retired and took their fat GM pensions and excellent health benefits to Florida, Arizona, and other places. That's about $2400 or more per month per retiree that is getting fed into a local economy 1,000+ miles away.

 

We can blame the union busting to some degree. But a lot of the blame falls on the union itself. Case in point, I recently talked to an older guy who was working at Wendy's in the late 1950s. He was earning 65 cents per hour. Then he got a job at Buick City for $2.64 per hour running a machine that made transmission cases for Buick. He told me that he could run his quota of parts on a 10-hour shift in about two hours. After about a week on the job, he would finish his production quota and then wander through the plant and offer his help to other workers. The union rep quickly shut that down. So instead of helping out on other jobs, while he was still on the clock, he'd sleep in the foreman's office on a cot about six hours per day and then spend about two hours doing his college homework.

 

This wasn't an isolated phenomenon. I had a friend in college who got a production job at the truck plant on Van Slyke in about 1998. He'd meet his quota in about three hours and then spend about five hours playing cards in the break room. It got to a point where he was so confident that he could work the system, that he actually scheduled his college classes for times that he was supposed to be at work and would have a coworker punch out for him.

 

The UAW has to accept some blame for the situation in Flint. The UAW more or less allowed/encouraged auto workers to prescribe to a philosophy of poor work ethics.

 

It's no wonder that the Japanese crushed the U.S. in automotive production costs in the 1980s.

This is well written and only really tells half of the GM story. I'm a GM retiree and can tell you I saw management waste ten times as much as their hourly workers. For every dime that a production worker wasted GM management wasted a dollar. There was ALWAYS plenty of work for me to do there and I always found something constructive to do when my boss was hiding somewhere. I owned my own business before I worked at GM and my work ethic was not ever tainted by bad management. What tainted my work record are the aresholes that liked to go around bragging about how they slept at work. Everyone loved those stories and they spread like wildfire. My stories about having fixed 50 machines in a day just fade in comparison to a story that people wanted to hear. 

[Wild Bill]

The UAW has to accept some blame for the situation in Flint. The UAW more or less allowed/encouraged auto workers to prescribe to a philosophy of poor work ethics.

 

Why is that the fault of the union? What prevented the company from telling them to get back to work? Why did the foreman let the worker sleep in his office?

 

One of the things most people seem to forget is that both sides sign the union contract.

 

Companies always cry, "The union is strangling us with that contract!".  It makes me wonder why they signed it in the first place.

 

The Japanese problem was mostly because their labor costs were so much lower. The auto companies were subsidized by Japan and also had no health care costs because they, like every other civilized country in the world, had government provided health care.

 

The auto companies were not and are not run by the unions. Policy decisions come from the gents in the ivory towers. (You should see how much work they do in a day.)

[Restorium2]

^^^^^^^^^ (You should see how much work they do in a day.)

[+Malamute]

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV

 

Level of GDP per capita and productivity

[suneday11]

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Edited January 19, 2016 by suneday11

[t-pain]

Swoops in to protect the biggest hater of the mmma.

who is the biggest hater of the mmma and who is protecting him?

[Restorium2]

We wake up every morning being reminded of how bad our government is. We already knew it because of what they have been doing behind the scenes. Things that are hard to convey to the public. Things we learned by paying attention because of medical cannabis. Now we have proof that we can display. It's not good for Flint in the short term. If we try hard enough it might make it so we can have a brighter future here for all Michiganders. Every dark cloud has a silver lining. If there is a silver lining to the dark cloud over Flint it's the clarity we have now with this crisis that blows away all the smoke and mirrors that hides the corruption. 

Edited January 19, 2016 by Restorium2

[suneday11]

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Edited January 19, 2016 by suneday11

[suneday11]

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Edited January 19, 2016 by suneday11

[beourbud]

Come on t. I don't even need to say it. We all call for his banning then zap replies by saying he will ban us. But hey, you guys want hits more than subject matter. Fine.

 

Lol Edited January 19, 2016 by beourbud

[Restorium2]

I still disagree that flint residents are happy to be poisoned. That was a monstrous thing to say. See page one if your brain is making stuff up again.

No one said that. You made it up.

[imiubu]

edited because my post is irrelevant now

 

Zap posted while I was typing mine.

[suneday11]

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Edited January 19, 2016 by suneday11

[suneday11]

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Edited January 19, 2016 by suneday11

[Restorium2]

I responded to highlander and sarcastically said that the people of flint must be happy to be poisoned if, as a result, repubs lost jobs. Clearly sarcasm and you replied, "they do" your hatred goes deeper than you even intend.

I have relatives that live in Flint and they are relieved only by the obviousness of who is at fault this time. I was relaying what they say. No one is happy anyone got poisoned, that should be obvious to everyone. 

[imiubu]

wow, I edited that immediately. 

 

I get the feeling you are just bucking for the arguments.

[beourbud]

it won't until resto is banned or scolded. It was norby last week, grass the week before. Now my turn, apparently because dems and repubs are involved in flint water crisis.

Lol

Edited January 19, 2016 by beourbud

[Restorium2]

wow, I edited that immediately. 

 

I get the feeling you are just bucking for the arguments.

Disrupting important topics.

[suneday11]

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Edited January 19, 2016 by suneday11

[suneday11]

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Edited January 19, 2016 by suneday11

[beourbud]

What I wanna know is how many members IP addys are influencing Michigan politics from out of state?

We Michiganders take care of our own, and we respect the blessing that is Fresh Water.

 

Get use to politics, your living it.

Edited January 19, 2016 by beourbud