Greece, as well as many other European countries, has lived for a long time on soft socialism. As time went by, more and more “worker protections” were passed making it hard to fire people, giving away bigger and bigger government pensions, more and more civil servants on the payroll, more “bonuses” to those civil servants, and even lying to the rest of the world about how much money was actually being spent by governments. But, as anyone who can do a little math would conclude, this can’t go on forever. You can’t go on forever spending more money than you take in. I know, I know, many politicians and other apologist buffoons will tell you that we can indeed go on spending forever, but they are either stupid or lying.

I’d like to re-post some items from a blog I regularly visit, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis:

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Social unrest continues to brew in Europe. This time in Romania and Greece. France is on deck as French President Nicolas Sarkozy battles unions who refuse any cuts in pension benefits. French unions have called for a general strike starting May 27.

Let’s kick of the discussion with a look at Romania. The BBC reports Thousands protest over Romania austerity measures.

Tens of thousands of public sector workers have gathered in the Romanian capital Bucharest to protest against plans to cut wages and pensions. The gathering was one of the biggest on the streets of Bucharest was one of the biggest since the Romanian Revolution.

“We will not leave until the government quits,” said Bogdan Hossu, leader of the Cartel Alfa trade union. Marian Gruia, head of the policemen’s union, called on Romanians to unite, “as we did in 1989, when we overthrew the dictatorship” of communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu.

Romania’s economy shrunk more than 7% last year and it needed an IMF bail-out in order to meet its wage bill. It says it needs to implement new austerity measures to qualify for the next installment of the 20m-euro ($25bn; £17bn) IMF loan.

The government has proposed wage cuts of 25% and pension cuts of 15% in order to reduce the country’s budget deficit.

New Wave of Strikes in Greece Over Painful Austerity Measures

Please consider Greek unions hold new general strike against cuts

Unions plan to protest the painful austerity measures of Greece’s cash-strapped government by holding a general strike Thursday that will close much of the country’s public sector and shut down the country’s ferries, trains and public transport.

Thursday’s strike is to shut down schools, tax and local administration offices, ferries, trains and most other public transport options in Athens. State hospitals will have to operate with emergency staff only.

Most flights will be unaffected, as air traffic controllers will stay on the job. However, some regional airports will close, and Greece’s Olympic Air carrier said it was canceling 30 domestic flights.

Austerity Woes in France

Inquiring minds are reading Sarkozy Grapples With ‘Politically Unacceptable’ Deficit Cuts.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s popularity fell to its lowest since his 2007 election last month. Worse may lie ahead as he cuts spending and raises taxes in the wake of Europe’s financial crisis.

Sarkozy risks increasing voters’ ire two years ahead of presidential elections as he strives to meet promised deficit- reduction targets and pacify investors. The choices include the politically sensitive areas of lifting the top tax rate and tightening pension requirements.

“Austerity is economically necessary but politically unacceptable,” said Laurent Dubois, a professor at Paris’s Institute of Political Studies. “But he has no choice, the debts are too heavy.”

The dilemma facing the French leader, who took office three years ago this week, underscores the bind facing European Union politicians, whose response to the Greek debt crisis prompted them to pledge reductions in their deficits and public debt.

Sarkozy has said he will cut France’s deficit to 3 percent of economic output in 2013 from 8 percent now. His reliance on a spending freeze, economic growth and a pension overhaul will get him only partway there, according to Samuel-Frederic Serviere, a researcher at Ifrap, a Paris-based group that monitors government spending

“With just the measures that have been announced, at best we’ll get the deficit down to 5 percent by 2013, and that’s in the best of cases,” Serviere said. “What they’ve announced so far just isn’t sufficient given our European engagements.”

Union leaders say they won’t accept any change to France’s legal retirement age of 60 and have called a general strike for May 27. The opposition Socialist Party is also defending retirement at 60 and says higher taxes will plug the deficit.

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What does this have to do with Grand Rapids? We see our own microcosm of looming austerity here. As this blog has pointed out over and over, the city’s pension plans are unsustainable. Rather than do anything about it, the city’s leaders pleaded for, and got, a tax increase that will, at most, kick the problem down the road for 12 months. As I’ve demonstrated, the city’s pension plans are a ticking time bomb that will bankrupt the city. Not might bankrupt the city. The city’s pensions will bankrupt the city. The city’s politicians don’t want to deal with that now, though. They prefer to string the problem out as long as possible. In the mean time, they threaten us with reduced police and fire protection if we don’t approve their pension bailout.

Well, it worked. Now the city’s taxpayers get to pay more. The increased taxes will not restore or increase city services. In fact, the tax increase has guaranteed that city services will continue to be cut. How? Because we extended their pension failure by one year. All this extension does is guarantee that things will be worse next year by not addressing the root of the problem.

And that brings us back to the beginning of this article. Politicians do not stop overspending until they are forced to. Eventually Grand Rapids’ politicians will be forced to fix the issue, but until then, they will do everything in their power to keep the failed pension plans going. This guarantees that more and more money goes to pensions and less and less money goes to doing what a city should actually be doing: police, fire, roads, etc. The citizens will suffer while the politicians cower and fail. The city’s bureaucrats will eventually be forced into austerity.

We have tea parties (which were silent in regards to Grand Rapids’ tax increase) who claim they want cuts in government, but it’s clear people don’t actually want any cuts, because so many people are dependent on the government’s teat. We all want to live off someone else. That works fine for a while, then suddenly it doesn’t.

I’ll end this post with another prescient quote:

“Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a pampered overclass, rioting in defence of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.”

This is on top of the $7 million pension deficit that was already budgeted for next year. This means that the pension fund contribution deficit (not the total amount due) is now over $10 million, just for next year.

And the city continues to maintain that the income tax increase on the ballot May 4th will “save” or “increase” city services. The income tax increase is expected to raise about $7 million next year. How exactly do they expect to “increase” or “save” city jobs when the new pension deficit alone is over $10 million. Now we’re at a point where more than 100% of the income tax increase will go solely to the pension plans (as I demonstrated, using the city’s own numbers). If the income tax increase passes, it will go straight from the wallets of city residents to the pension fund.

The city has been having a series of “town hall” meeting to explain and drum up support for the income tax increase. By the sounds of it, they aren’t going so well:

Bill Kudlack showed up at Monday’s town hall meeting on the fence about whether to support a city income tax increase over the next five years. He left still on his perch.

“There is a lot of government waste, and I always think you can cut somewhere else,” said Kudlack, emphasizing he needs to be convinced officials have done everything possible to reduce costs before coming to taxpayers for a hike.

But Mike Farage said he left the meeting even more convinced he can’t support a higher income tax.

“Clearly, their best is not good enough,” Farage said of using taxpayer dollars efficiently. “They are also using the typical scare tactic when it comes to police and fire services.”

Only about 40 people showed up at Union High School for the first of six scheduled town hall meetings, and many of those were city employees. The meetings are designed to examine city finances and inform voters about the two May 4 ballot requests.

The word is getting out there: the income tax increase will do nothing to save or improve city services.

The city bureaucrats and politicians are desperate to prop up the failing pension systems at all cost, no matter how much it costs taxpayers. They want to continue to make sure the problem is put off as long as possible. But math is a simple thing – it always works. Not even the Grand Rapids city commission can repeal the laws of compounding numbers. The pension plans will fail. The question is how long will we, as residents, tolerate cutting our family budgets just to fund Cadillac pension plans for city workers?

I will quote extensively from his comments and bold the comments that I believe are important to note. This financial report is extremely relevant to the upcoming income tax increase on the ballot May 4th. For more information on that subject, see my posts on the income tax increase (Grand Rapids Tax Increase: It’s the Pensions Stupid, and Grand Rapids Fires Police, Firefighters, Keeps Parking Lot Sweepers).

By approving this tax increase, the taxpayers of the city will simply be kicking the can down the road one more year. As I’ve already demonstrated, if the tax increase passes, the city will be forced to come back again next year for even more money because the pension plans are killing the city’s budget.

Here are CFO Scott Buhrer’s comments. I know it’s long, but reading it is a must for all city residents:

Today it is obvious that the U.S. economy has far more capacity to produce goods and services than the demand for those goods and service. So any increase in demand will result in little price change. This will be the case until our underemployment rate of over 17% (the U6 measure) drops by a considerable amount and we begin to use our factories well above our current 72% utilization rate. In his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, correctly predicted that monetary policy (i.e. zero interest rates) would not lead us out of this financial crisis, and subsequently, as a columnist for the New York Times, Krugman has written of his belief that much more federal stimulus funding is required. But, at the end of the day, can you solve a problem that at its very heart emanates from excessive debt by continuing to fuel demand underwritten by government debt?

Over the last year I have provided assessments of National, State, and local economies. On September 15th I reported that the federal government had spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the United States last year (i.e. Gross Domestic Product, or GDP).

Which brings us to today. Irrespective of whether the economic recovery has begun or not, the United States (and much of the rest of the industrialized world for that matter), will face a long and difficult stretch of time as we deal with the excessive debt levels that have been accumulated over the past two decades.

The 19th-century British journalist Walter Bagehot claimed that during each speculative upturn merchants and bankers “believe that the prosperity they see will last always, that it is only the beginning of greater prosperity.” A boom in U.S. stocks in the early 1900’s was remembered by Alexander Dana Noyes, the financial editor of the New York Times in the 1920’s, as “the first of such speculative demonstrations in history which based its ideas and conduct on the assumption that we were living in a New Era; that old rules and principles and precedents of finance were obsolete; that things could be done safely today which had been dangerous and impossible in the past.” This mode of wishful thinking has continued up to the present day.

Instead of providing beneficial warning, economists have more often played the role of enablers during each successive New Era. The noted and early neoclassical economist whose work is perhaps more respected now than when he was alive, Irving Fisher of Yale, notoriously opined in September 1929 that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau,” justifying this view with the claim that Prohibition had enhanced worker productivity and that businesses were employing new “scientific” management practices.

More recently, just a few short years ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and a number of other academic economists hailed the “Great Moderation,” arguing that rising institutional debt levels were tolerable, thanks to better monetary policy and better risk reducing financial innovations. During the boom years, Mr. Bernanke pronounced that rising house prices were a sign of improved economic fundamentals rather than speculative excess. It turns out that the Great Moderation was, in fact, a trap – a time of overindulgence of borrowing and risk-taking that would eventually destroy wealth rather than create it. Financial catastrophe is invariably preceded by periods of prosperity and New Era rationalizations.

The same Irving Fisher first highlighted the fact that an economy’s debt level could have harmful impacts on the economic growth, if it is excessive. In 1933 Fisher published his debt deflation theory that pointed out that the contraction of debt levels (which is currently occurring) usually results in prolonged economic distress. Borrowing binges invariably unwind, often quite precipitously, with sharp declines in asset prices, consumption, and high unemployment.

Housing prices are a remarkably accurate predictor of banking crises. Banking crises often follow periods of financial liberalization or deregulation. For all its “this-time-is-different hubris”, the United States has proved no exception. Rapidly rising housing prices should have set off alarm bells. Especially when the cumulative real price (i.e. inflation adjusted) increase in the United States between 1995 and 2006 rose 92%, more than three times the 27% gain for the preceding 100 or so years – and the total value of mortgages reached 90% of GDP. In 2005 alone, at the height of the bubble, real housing prices rose more than 12%, which was six times the rate of GDP growth.

International institutions (e.g. the International Monetary Fund) might help avert crises by promoting greater transparency in reporting financial data. Although it’s better than most, the United States government “runs an extraordinarily opaque accounting system.” In the past two years, the federal government (including the Federal Reserve) added huge off-balance-sheet guarantees and trillions of dollars of difficult-to-price assets to its books – and to date the Federal Reserve has refused to disclose details about these assets to the U.S. Congress. Bloomberg (a media company providing business and financial news and information) has sued in an attempt to compel disclosure.

What we do know is that Congress authorized up to $300 billion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Quietly, on Christmas Eve, Treasury pledged unlimited support for the two agencies, without any additional Congressional approval.

Financial over-indulgence knows no boundaries and has no expiration date. Human nature is at the heart of the financial disasters. A recurring theme: investors, lenders and policymakers repeatedly delude themselves during economic booms into thinking that business cycles have been repealed and that the good times will go on and on. Indeed, after the recent financial collapse, 140 banks failed in 2009. If you think banking failures are declining and the financial crisis is over, consider this: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) board recently voted to approve the 2010 budget, which includes $2.5 billion for staffing to resolve failed banks taken over by the agency. That does not include the cost of winding up the affairs of these failed banks, which is almost impossible to estimate. That FDIC budget for staffing to resolve the affairs of the failed institutions is up 92% from $1.3 billion in 2009. The hiring plans will bring the number of FDIC employees to 8,653. Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC, said the budget approved for 2010 “will ensure that we are prepared to handle an even larger number of bank failures next year, if that becomes necessary and to provide regulatory oversight for an even larger number of troubled institutions.” The number of problem banks on the FDIC’s confidential list as of September 30th more than doubled to 552 – the highest level in 16 years – up from 250 at the start of the year.

Three important factors pertain to the present situation in the United States and the world.

First, when debt becomes excessive, regardless of whether the government or the private sector is accumulating the debt, countries lose the ability to grow their way out of the problem; they must go through the time consuming and often painful processes of debt repayment and increased savings.

Second, whether the debt is owed externally or internally is not as critical as the excessiveness of the debt. Economic damage occurs as a result of extreme over-leverage, whether the barometer of performance is economic output, the labor markets, or asset prices.

Third, government actions, even involving sizable sums of money, are far less helpful than they appear. Further increasing government debt to solve the problem of over-indebtedness in the private sector only leads to greater systemic risk and general economic underperformance.

The question that is currently being debated is “are we headed for massive inflation or deflation”? As is widely feared here in the U.S., many countries have had the right
circumstances and mechanisms to inflate away their debt overhang, and, in fact, have done so by debasing their currency. This approach poses the most risk to those individuals who are on fixed incomes. Those particular circumstances, however, are not currently present in the United States, not with underemployment in excess of 17% and industrial capacity utilization at 72%.

I view the present inflationary environment as benign because: 1) the U.S. economic system is overleveraged and academic research confirms that this circumstance leads to deflation; 2) monetary policy is, and will continue to be, ineffectual as efforts to spur growth are thwarted by declining asset prices, loan destruction, and adverse regulatory influences; and 3) the federal government’s stimulus spending will ultimately lead to increased taxes and governmental borrowings must inevitably rise, further stunting any economic growth. These factors ensure that inflation will remain contained. Interest rates easily can and do rise for short periods, but remaining elevated in a disinflationary environment is contrary to the historical experience. If we do see higher interest rates it could be coupled with stagflation.

Fisher’s 1933 “Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions” and modern “quantitative” methods have now essentially confirmed this conclusion: over-indebtedness and major contractions, particularly those that involve geographical regions (or in the present situation, extend worldwide) lead to deflation, not inflation.

The U.S. response and the world-wide response to the financial crisis have been remarkable.

But, we may find that at the end of the road, the cure could be as deadly as the illness. In 2009 the book This Time is Different – Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff compiled a database by looking at over 250 financial crises in 66 countries over a period of 800 years. The common theme in explaining the crises is that debt was excessive relative to national income (GDP). They make the compelling case that this old rule still applies and this time is not different. After studying data spanning 800 years, Reinhart and Rogoff characterize the current financial crisis as the “ Second Great Contraction.”

Broadly speaking, financial crises are protracted affairs. More often than not, the aftermath of severe financial crises such as the one that we are currently experiencing, share three characteristics:

First, asset market collapses are deep and prolonged. Declines in real housing prices average 35% stretched out over six years, whereas equity price collapses average 56% over a downturn of about three and a half years.

Second, the aftermath of banking crises is associated with profound declines in output and employment. The unemployment rate rises an average of seven percentage points during the down phase of the cycle, which lasts on an average more than four years. Output falls (from peak to trough) more than 9% on average, although the duration of the downturn, averaging roughly two years, is considerably shorter than that of unemployment.

Third, the amount of government debt tends to explode; it rose an average of 86% (in real terms, relative to pre-crisis debt) in the major post-World War II episodes. The main cause of debt explosions is not the widely cited costs of bailing out and recapitalizing the banking system. The upper-bound estimates of the banking bailout costs pale next to actual measured increases in public debt. The biggest driver of the governmental debt increase is the inevitable collapse in tax revenues that governments suffer in the wake of deep and prolonged output contractions.

The Reinhart and Rogoff book is very sobering. It provides extensive empirical data that supports my belief that we have a lot of pain left to experience because of the bad choices our nation has made. We, in this case, is the entire developed industrialized world, and the emerging world will suffer, too, as we go through it. It is not a matter of pain or no pain. There is now no way to avoid it. It is simply a matter of when and over how long a period. The lesson of history, then, is that even as the economy and financial institutions improve, there will always be a temptation to stretch the limits. Just as an individual can go bankrupt no matter how rich she starts out, a financial system can collapse under the pressure of greed, politics, and profits no matter how well regulated it seems to be.

Yet the ability of governments and investors to delude themselves, giving rise to periodic bouts of euphoria that usually end in tears, seems to have remained a constant. No careful reader of Friedman and Schwartz will be surprised by this lesson about the ability of governments to mismanage financial markets, a key theme of their analysis. As for financial markets, we have come full circle to the concept of financial fragility in economies with massive indebtedness.

All too often, periods of heavy borrowing can take place in a bubble and last for a surprisingly long time. This time may seem different, but all too often a deeper look shows it is not. Deficit spending only provides a transitory boost to the economy. It initially raises GDP, as it did in the second half of 2009, but then the effect dissipates and later is reversed, as financial resources available to the private sector are reduced.

Conclusion

The enormous amount of federal borrowing and stimulus programs are likely to serve to restrict long-term economic growth. The slow U.S. economic growth environment will obviously lead to continuing budget challenges for the City and the State. If we continue to push expenses into future years it will assure that our future will be challenging even if the economy improves.

“When automated ticketing machines took over her job, Grand Rapids Parking Facility Attendant Leah Leonhardt feared being laid off.

On Thursday, parking leaders agreed to a plan that would save her job and five other full-time positions, as well as scrap plans to privatize about 20 seasonal employees.

Now, Leonhardt spends her days shoveling snow, cleaning ramp decks, and collecting and counting cash, but that’s fine with her.

So let me get this straight: The city fired 44 police officers and 25 firefighters, but has decided to keep 26 parking lot sweepers and other seasonal employees?

Oh, and of course the city is claiming that they need a $7 million tax hike in May, 100% of which will go straight to the city’s underfunded pension plan.

What you’re witnessing is the breakdown of government’s ability to make rational decisions. Look for a lot more bad decisions as revenue continues to decline and unions press harder on their city government puppets to curry more favors, at our expense.

Why is this issue important? Because the state will eventually have to repay this borrowed money. We’re talking about billions of dollars.

According to the web site Pro Publica, Michigan is the number two borrower of federal funds to pay unemployment benefits (behind California). The negative balance of the state’s unemployment fund now stands at $3.429 billion. This negative balance is rising almost exponentially. In December alone, the state paid out $243 million more than it collected in unemployment taxes from employers.

2009′s “stimulus” law contained a provision that allowed states to avoid interest payments through 2011, but the bill will eventually come due. The kicker is that higher unemployment taxes on employers will be imposed to attempt to pay this shortage back, but that will just serve to kill more jobs as businesses are saddled with even more costs of doing business.

As the private sector has collapsed under the weight of debt saturation, government has begun to take on the debt load.This won’t end well.

The problem is that so many people are now dependent on government handouts, the political will to fix the situation will be almost impossible to come by. The entitlement  culture will only be curtailed where there is no other choice. And that may be sooner than we think.

We see our own microcosm of this with the crushing pension costs in Grand Rapids. The city’s commission is asking for an income tax increase, 100% of which will go to pay pension costs. And that’s just for the first year. They will have to come back to taxpayers to cover the tens of millions more they will need to pay just to keep the pension fund solvent. Let me repeat, just so it’s clear. This income tax increase will do nothing to improve or prop up city services. It will go only to pay for pensions.

Multiply this by all the cities in Michigan by all the states in the nation by all the people on federal benefits.

Just to illustrate, please observe the national debt’s growth rate:

National Debt Doom

That’s called a parabola. It will fail. Nature doesn’t tolerate exponential growth rates.

There are several tools available online to see the values of homes that recently sold in your area for comparison to your own, such as trulia.com and zillow.com. Be sure to look for the “recently sold” sections of those web sites. Since property values have dropped approximately 30% in the area, it’s well worth it to challenge your taxable property values.

The Michigan Taxpayers Alliance also offers a DVD workshop that helps you with the process, for $10. You can check it out here.

State Representative Dave Hildenbrand offers a useful guide for appealing here.

Be aware, the deadline for filing appeals is February 12th!

Due to the near-complete collapse of state revenues, the cuts have (finally) been forthcoming. Public schools received per-pupil cuts of approximately $300 for the current fiscal year. State agencies have been ordered by the governor to cut 10% of their budgets. The cycle of layoffs and reduced revenues continues.

The result? Governor Granholm and the MEA have begun hyperventilating. This week they staged a massive lobbying effort to get legislators to increase taxes. Apparently they don’t require Economics 101 in teacher colleges.

On the city level, Grand Rapids has seen a similar decline in income tax revenues and property tax revenues will probably see declines due to historic drops in resale values of homes and commercial property. Immediately upon announcing the layoffs of 125 city employees, Mayor Heartwell called for a ballot question to raise taxes in the city. He claims there hasn’t been a tax increase in 15 years. Apparently the constant reduction of the personal income tax exemption, the added property tax bill “service fee,” and the increase in trash collection property tax don’t count as tax increases in the mayor’s book.

Oh, and don’t forget that The Rapid is coming back, probably in early 2010 to ask, again, for a tax increase to build the redundant and wasteful “Silver Line” bus service, to clog up Division during rush hour.

But the fiscal problems are just beginning, and there is very little sign that anyone is proposing real solutions. The “easy” way out, increasing taxes, will only work so much. They will run in to the law of diminishing returns. The speaker of the state house, Democrat Andy Dillon, apparently grew some huevos and bucked his MEA masters by proposing the pooling of all public school health plans into one statewide health plan. The MEA, fearing the loss of their money-laundering cash cow health plan MESSA, promptly went ape-sh*t. This illustrates the difficulty of real, substantive change at the state level. So many special interests peddling their influence (in the form of money) makes it nearly impossible to propose an innovative solution to the state’s structural budget problems.

Of course, then there are the unsustainable defined-benefit Ponzi public pension plans. They will fail. It’s just a matter of time. Even politicians can’t repeal the laws of compounding numbers. But I’m sure they will try.

But we should turn to the local level, where real people can have the most chance of affecting change. We can, as a city, choose to continue down the ultimately disastrous path of “the easy way out,” or we can have real, substantive change in how city government does business.

A quick overview of what’s going on at the local level: As state revenue declines, so does the state subsidy to cities called revenue sharing. Revenue sharing has been on the decline for several years. City leaders keep pointing to how much has been “lost,” but their complaints fall on deaf ears – or at least ears that understand that cities fall further back in line from other special interest groups.

As revenue sharing declines, so have city income tax receipts. The city’s income tax revenue is down 14% (apparently year on year).

Not only has revenue been on the decline, the gigantic hydrogen bomb of the city’s pension system is preparing to detonate. The city’s 2010 fiscal plan (published before the layoffs were announced this week), is available here. One paragraph should stand out and set off all the alarm bells in the city:

In FY2007 our two pension retirement trusts were 110% and 120% funded.  Both employer and employee contribution levels were at or near the lowest possible levels.  This advantage was eliminated by the breathtaking decline of the financial markets over the past 18 months.  We now know that our retirement funds are significantly underfunded. This means that both employee and employer contributions must move dramatically higher.  Proposed changes to actuarial assumptions and plan provisions will freeze employee contributions at the bottom of the contribution range and provide additional time for the City to adjust to higher employer contributions.  Nonetheless, the employer share will go from 7.7% in to 9.29% in FY2010, and 13.62% in FY2011 for the General Pension and from an FY2010 rate of 0% to an estimated 23% in FY2011 for the Police/Fire Pension.  These percentages assume that we will be able to implement critical smoothing techniques that will mitigate the intense upward pressure on required contributions. The increase in employer funding requirements contributed to the FY2010 GOF operating deficit of $2.9 million.  Unless we see a significant increase in the market value of retirement plan assets over the next couple of years, the estimated pension contribution will continue to rise. (emphasis mine)

Translation: 2010 layoffs are just the beginning. Fiscal Year 2010 includes a pension contribution (as a percentage of salaries) for the police and fire employees of 0%. Yes, 0%. This will go from 0% to 23% (of salaries) in one year. A search of the fiscal plan shows that total personnel costs for police and fire are about $67 million. Let’s back out about 40% of that (just a wild guess) to come to actual base salary cost. We come up with about $40 million. Now,  re-read the above paragraph. The city is going from contributing $0 in the current fiscal year to the police and fire pension plan to (my estimate) of 23% of salaries in 2011 – or about $10 million. The increase in contributions for the other defined-benefit pension participants on the city’s payroll will increase from 9.29% this year to 13.62% next year. This is unsustainable.

The mayor’s solution? Raise taxes.

Lest I be declared someone who only points out problems and no solutions, here are a few suggestions:

1. Lay off all non-essential employees. This includes the “equal opportunity” department of five people.
2. Outsource information technology (IT) services.
3. Eliminate the Office of Children, Youth, and Families.
4. Convert all employees, now, to a defined-contribution retirement plan. NOW.
5. Eliminate the Downtown Development Authority. This entity sucks up about $17 million of local property tax revenue that would normally go to the city’s general operating fund. The DDA also currently owns the Van Andel Arena. Sell the arena, pay off the outstanding bonds, and use the excess to pay off some of the DeVos Place bonds. The DDA currently operates as a taxpayer-funded subsidy to developers, giving away free money to those who ask.
6. Implement a fire department response fee. Most (if not all) homeowners insurance plans offer coverage if you’re charged for fire department response.
7. Eliminate the city’s trash collection services. There is a special property tax levied for this. There are plenty of private trash haulers. Once the trash collection services are eliminated, go to voters and ask them if it’s ok to convert the current trash levy on property tax to a general fund levy so that it can be spent on other city services (including police).
8. Contact every citizen and ask them what their priorities are. Do you prefer Police and smooth roads, or do you prefer an equal opportunity department and subsidies for developers?

If serious, dramatic changes are not implemented, the city will go bankrupt. This has started to happen in other states. There is no chance in h*ll that the economy is going to return to anywhere near where it was at the peak of the last cycle in 2007 – at least not any time soon.

Tough choices need to be made now – if our politicians can stomach it.

The Grand Valley Metro Council (very much pro-Silver Line) won $400,000 in federal grants to clean up several abandoned sites along Division avenue, in the hopes that this will attract more development. You can almost hear how this would have been announced if the Silver Line had passed. It would have been touted as the first in a series of positive developments because of the Silver Line. Of course, the Silver Line had nothing to do with this grant award, but it underlines the claims that these sorts of transportation projects somehow spur development. However, as this news item shows, the development is largely spurred by government subsidy, not the appearance of a fancy silver-colored bus line. The Rapid supporters confuse correlation with causation. It goes against logic that replacing the current buses with buses that are painted silver will someone convince people and business to move to Division Avenue.

As we have previously pointed out, the development in Portland around mass transit, as the pro-Rapid supporters love to point to, only occurred after government subsidies were enacted. The development did not occur due to the mass transit system. This is the heart of the pro-Silver Line argument; that the Silver Line “would have” spurred several dollars’ worth of development for each dollar spent. This is simply not the case. The only evidence the Rapid points to in support of their argument is a thinly-documented three page article, as we pointed out here.

However, this Press article also points out that they haven’t given up on the Silver Line boondoggle. The article states, “Although [The Rapid] expects the Silver Line route eventually to win the voters’ blessing, plenty of other properties could be helped in the meantime . . .” Clearly they aren’t done with trying to sell this mess to the voters. Based on the negative Silver Line feedback both in the Press and on other online sources, it seems unlikely that they can salvage this project without significant changes. Even the pro-transit people weren’t convinced about the need for the Silver Line.

General Motors, the City of Detroit, and Everyone Else Feeding At the Trough of Government

It was only a matter of time. Now that the Congress and US Treasury have decided that it is legitimate for the Federal Government to spend $700 billion “bailing out” various banks and financial companies, the line is getting longer of those holding their hands out for free money from heaven.

First, we were told that if the Federal Government didn’t spend $700 billion (a figure pulled out of thin air) to buy “toxic assets” from failing banks, that the world would end. Then, this week, we are told that they don’t plan to buy any toxic assets at all. Instead, everyone and their brother is holding their hands out to get more free money from the government.

General Motors is in dire straights as they burn through $2 billion in cash each month because they are such a colossal failure of a company. But hey, who cares, let’s lend them another $10 billion or more to keep the doors open, even though they already have a negative net worth of over $59 billion. Just because they’ve lost $75 billion over the last few years and they can’t pay the bills as it stands, borrowing more money from taxpayers, when no bank in the universe would do so, is a sure way to fix things, right?

But wait, don’t look twice. Now cities are asking for bailout money. That’s right, the City of Detroit is asking for $10 billion to shore up their budget. That’s in addition to Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta. More to come, just stay tuned.

Next, our own City of Grand Rapids admitted this week that their financial manager, apparently having the intelligence level of a monkey with a typewriter, has lost $225 million of pension funds since May. Nowhere in the discussion was mention of firing the idiot who has lost that much. No, instead they discussed how to dump an additional $10 million into the fund next year. Oh, and they promise they won’t raise taxes to do so (wink wink).

Folks, this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the moronity in Washington (and Lansing) seems to be at an all time peak. These bailouts do not come without consequence. Bad companies need to fail. Cities need to get their financial decks in order. Unsustainable pyramid-scheme defined-benefit pension plans are destined to fail. It’s just that no one wants to face the facts now, they prefer to defer those problems to future ill-informed politicians.

Well, the cows have come home, and we have yet to see any real intelligence shining through the political class. No, instead we have the Michigan House of Representatives ramming through a law to ban wine retailers from shipping to Michigan residents. Ah yes, priorities.

It looks like the national debt is going to increase by $2 trillion or more next year as the US Treasury issues debt like there’s no tomorrow. The next problem is that foreign countries will slow their buying of US debt. We’re already seeing a decrease in demand for treasury issues. Countries like China and Japan are more interested in spending money on their own people than buying US Treasury securities. The stuff is coming even closer to intersecting with the fan.

Folks, this problem was created by government in the first place. We have a federal reserve that prints money out of thin air, encourages malinvestment through artifically low interest rates, and encourages leverage through fractional reserve banking. This house of cards is beginning to fall. Government can not spend its way out of this. In fact, government is making things worse.

Stop the bailouts. Stop the futile “stimulus” discussions. Reduce taxes and spending dramatically. Phase out the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and all the pseudo-government entities that created this mess in the first place. It will be painful and rotten, but it will clear out the cancer of perverse government incentives in the market and allow our economy to heal itself.

But, frankly, there is no hope of any of that happening. That’s why we ain’t seen nothin yet.

What would this light rail system look like? The plan is to have one rail route, from the Sixth Street/Monroe intersection, south on Monroe Avenue, to the Rapid bus depot. That’s a grand total of about 3 miles. $24.8 million per mile.

The plan also calls for up to 2,900 passengers per day. The $1.30 cost of riding the streetcar would cover only about one third of the annual $1.75 million cost to continue operations.

Never mind the rediculous re-engineering that Monroe would need to build this thing (seven lanes wide?), why can’t buses accomplish the same thing? We’re no fan of the inefficient fixed route bus system that The Rapid employs, but good God, anything would be better than the joke that this light rail system would be.

Of course, the magical benefits of this system are touted, such as $5 in development growth for each $1 spent on the system. Where do they get that number? They often point to Portland’s light rail system, which supposedly spurred so much development. But did it really? A recent report from the Cato Institute looks at just that question. A couple of telling excerpts:

[W]hen Portland’s first light-rail line opened for business in 1986, the city zoned much of the land near light-rail stations for high-density development. Ten years later, city planner Mike Saba sadly reported to the Portland city council, “we have not seen any of the kind of development—of a mid-rise, higher-density, mixed use, mixed-income type—that we would’ve liked to have seen” along the light-rail line.

…

Over the next decade, the city experienced a boom in high-density developments, virtually all of which were [taxpayer] subsidized.

…

Measured by value, the vast majority of the $1 billion of investments supposedly stimulated by the [Portland] light rail consists of government buildings, some built in response to executive orders by President Clinton and Oregon’s Governor Barbara Roberts that all federal and state agencies should relocate to downtown areas.44 One government-funded building supposedly stimulated by the lightrail line was a $5 million downtown parking garage. If light-rail works so well, why is a new garage needed and in what sense did light rail stimulate the construction of that garage?

Laughably, The Rapid’s web site has on its FAQ page the following item:

• Why not change the current bus system instead of spending new money on streetcars?
• Streetcars have several desirable features for downtown areas. First, with metro dwellers and workers nationwide demonstrating a strong preference for rail transit, streetcar systems draw more riders than equivalent bus systems.
• Second, streetcars have no vehicle emissions and therefore help improve air quality.
• Third, while streetcars have a higher initial investment, their operating cost is typically lower than equivalent bus systems. Higher operating cost for buses is attributed to escalating diesel costs, and shorter service life. The average life span for streetcars is 25 to 40 years and 12 years for buses. This trade-off will be part of the feasibility study evaluation. Is it worth a higher initial cost to provide increased benefits for many years to come?

First, the idea that more people like streetcars because they are cooler than buses has got to be the worst possible reason to spend $79 million. Second, the idea that streetcars don’t pollute is false, since they use electricity, and since much of our nation’s electricity is generated by coal power plants (or natural gas), there certainly are emissions. And third, as we’ve demonstrated previously, the Rapid loses about $5.82 per passenger when they ride a traditional bus. The Rapid will lose approximately $2.60 per passenger when they use the light rail, and that doesn’t include the capital costs. When you factor in a 30 year usable life for the initial capital costs, the loss per passenger rises to about $8.39 each. Where do you think that subsidy comes from? You guessed it… us, the taxpayers! That’s hardly more efficient than a traditional bus.

What are these people thinking? Can they see the forest from the trees?

You can read more excellent points debunking the value of the Portland light rail system at the Antiplanner web site.