Thursday, May 24, 2012

A Forewarning: Cities Shutting Off Street Lights to Save Money

Declining revenues, the Great Recession, the housing crash and poorly managed city budgets are forcing many cities to cut back on government provided services. Even street lights.

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights, reports Bloomberg.

More than 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city can’t afford to fix them.

Other U.S. cities that have gone partially dark to save money, include Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois.

Highland Park, Michigan, a city that borders Detroit, removed 1,100 of 1,600 streetlights last year, after piling up a $4 million debt to DTE Energy.

Colorado Springs removed. 9,000 of its 25,600 lights in 2010.

Consider lights going out in cities a forewarning as to what will happen when states like California and Illinois go broke. Either the federal government will step in and bail the states out by printing more money, or the states will go bankrupt. Bankruptcy should be considered the best option for any government in financial trouble, from Greece to Rockford, IL. Those, in other words, who funded the grotesque expansion of government by buying government debt, should pay the cost. More than likely,though, a central bank will come to the rescue of the creditors and print money so that we all have to pay via price inflation.

7 comments:

  1. Cue the Bee Gees:
    "And the lights all went out in Massachusetts..."
    R.I.P., Robin.

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  2. Eerily reminiscent of the end of Atlas Shrugged...

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  3. Just to be clear, Highland Park, MI is completely surrounded by Detroit except for a small part that borders Hamtramck which is also completely surrounded by Detroit.

    http://tinyurl.com/bwwmhfl

    All of these towns are the beneficiaries of decades of the joys of "progressive" administration.

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  4. "Declining revenues, the Great Recession, the housing crash and poorly managed city budgets are forcing many cities to cut back on government provided services. Even street lights."

    That's unusually honest! If they looked to the UK they could have seen the same thing happening but under the guise of environmentalism. Yes, some local authorities, including mine, switch off street lights at night "to reduce carbon emissions".

    I don't mind for myself. I live in a fairly prosperous and relatively safe rural area and I like seeing the night sky. In other places I certainly wouldn't be so sanguine.

    Still, it's yet another example of the obvious and visible being cut back first when government runs out of taxpayer cash. "Pony up some more or we starve the puppies" will be next.

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  5. When Prop 13 slashed California property taxes back in the day, the first thing that went was libraries, followed closely by fire protective services and cops (the last was not mourned by me).
    The other parasites were unscathed.

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  6. Oh that we could only shut off our government to save money. (I can dream, can't I?)

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  7. Why shouldn't we institute a budget referendum process in all levels of government so that the people have more direct control over how much the government is allowed to spend?

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