> social services
At a city level, that's a giant WTF!? for me. When I first encountered mention of it a couple of years ago I was so incredulous I did some web searches to make sure it was true.
The usual system is, "we're going to put an additional tax burden on the productive residents of our city. Then we're going to take the money to build huge Soviet-style apartment blocks and rent them (or provide them for free) to "the poor", for which we will advertise state- or nation-wide. Then we'll create an entire bureaucracy to service this new group of residents." Then you have second-stage places like Memphis, where the apartment blocks were deemed festering sores of crime (you think?!) and so they bought houses for all these people and relocated them. WTF?!
So people move as far away from these sores as they can, while their own city government plows money in to support them and make them bigger.
The mind, she boggle...
That's the kind of budgetary wanking that county or state budgets can support, but when cities do it, it makes no sense at all.
|