LIVING POLITICS

Howard Fineman

The Starving States

Inside Obama's meeting with a beleaguered group of governors.

Dec 2, 2008

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Ben Franklin invented the fire-fighting cooperative here in Philadelphia in the 18th century. But now his beloved and still gracious city has lost so much tax revenue in the Great Recession that it is shuttering firehouses from Northern Liberties to South Street.

So this was an appropriate place for Barack Obama to come to listen to the nation's governors tell him horror stories about their state budgets, which are falling deeper and deeper into the red.

Everybody wants money from the feds in general and the president-elect in particular. One day it's the banks; then it's the auto companies. Now it's the states.

It's not yet Christmas, and Obama was not elected to be Santa Claus. But the talk leading up to Inauguration Day has assumed the air of a Dickensian orphanage, with the inmates shouting, "more please!"

They are entitled: they are starving.

By state law and by state constitution in most places, governors must balance their own budgets. And unlike the federal government (which has no balanced-budget law with real teeth in it), the states can't print their own money to cover their bills and debts.

They are broke, as are an increasing number of cities and counties. That destitution, in turn, will have consequences for Americans everywhere—in the form of higher medical bills, tuition fees for schools and colleges, reduced social and community services (such as libraries) and higher taxes and fees of all kinds.

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Posted By: 40YearR @ 12/07/2008 4:16:08 PM

The links I gave above are dated, but not refuted. Check out this new AP article

http://www.newsweek.com/id/172797/page/1

The massive lobbying in the links provided earlier were just a few specific drops in the rainstorm describen in the AP article.

Does anyone, who actually reads the articles at the links I've provided, think this is just revisionist history? If so, then please provide citations.

A 40 year republicans
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Posted By: 40YearR @ 12/05/2008 8:07:57 PM

You didn't get this slop from CNN, It's just a recapitulation of the smear emails that started when McC hire Rick Davis and the Bushies to run his campaign.

If you really want to know, rather that regurgitate the preemptive lies, read these;

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/us/politics/22mccain.html and http://www.newsweek.com/id/164732/page/1

Davis was paid millions to lobby republicans against regulation, including while he was McC's campaign manager. One of the articles describes how the republicans had the votes to past that law, but massive lobbying of republicans kept it from even getting out of committee. They had the votes to do it without a single democrat vote.

You're the one who's pitching the revisionist history fed to you by the propaganda office.

A 40 year republican
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Posted By: OhioGal @ 12/05/2008 1:12:55 PM

Alot of our industrial goods are now made in China, a communist country, so it must be working for them. Our jobs have gone overseas because people in poorer countries will work for less, they also have a lower cost of living. Another major reason companies go overseas is so that they won't have to pay the large health benefits that companies pay American workers. Most countries have nationalized health or people who can afford to pay for medical care pay for it themselves.