This story comes to me courtesy of our lifestyle editor, Michael Redmond:
Colorado Springs cuts into services considered basic by many
The reason I share it — and that he passed it along — is that it just may be our future, if we’re not careful. The gist is this: The antitax fervor in the Springs has left the city with a busted budget and no hopes of generating new revenue. Without revenue, there is no way to pay for services — many of which most of us take for granted.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
It is not a pretty picture and it’s one we could face if we continue to pretend that we can have top-shelf services without paying for them.
I’ve been covering state and local government in New Jersey for a long time and it is clear to me that the credit-card mentality that nearly destroyed our economy (and remains likely to) has infected every public financial and fiscal decision we make.
New Jersey is buried in debt and facing a recurring, structural budget deficit. Its pension and healthcare systems have been borrowed against, leaving far too little money available to pay off our promises to state workers. The federal government, rather than help the states, spent the Bush years cutting taxes for the rich and pretending that the impending budget crisis would never come.
And it is here and has been for quite a while. And yet, everytime we talk about making tough decisions, we flinch. We think we can balance our books by eliminating waste and corruption, as if waste and corruption make up more than just a tiny fraction of our structural deficit. We have no interest in making real sacrifices — though we are willing to have others sacrifice on our behalf (the suburbs want spending on the cities cut, for instance, while many seniors are willing to skimp on school spending and so on).
Colorado Springs may seem like a novelty story, a one-off problem. But it isn’t. It is the canary in our fiscal coal mine and we better take heed.
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Hank Kalet 
Please don't fall for the sucker punch. The FIRST thing that entrenched politicians and bureaucrats do is cut services to the people. It is a sham. A pretense. A fraud. Did they cut the internal costs? How many honchos and hangers on did they nuke.When I worked on (Wall) Street, I had to cut my budget 50%. Part of my submission was to cut my service to my internal customers. My boss called me on the carpet to explain to me that I must have been \”smoking funny cigarettes\”. I was to keep my service at its then exceptional level and still cut my budget by half. Ominously, he told me \”to wise up\” otherwise he'd do it without me. With sweat running down my leg, I went back to my office and \”figured it out\”. We had to redesign every business process we used, but I \”figured it out\”!Soooo, let's hold these bozo's feet to the fire. Same rules: keep services at current level and still cut the budget as needed. If you can't do it, resign!Like my comment about the bailouts to Wall Street, if there was no bail out, the bozos on Wall Street would have (as if by magic) would have figured out how to save their skins. No bailout was needed. Similarly, no cuts to customer-facing services UNTIL we have resignations accepted!
I first read this article about Colorado Springs in Paul Krugman's blog. It was cited under the title, \”What small government looks like.\” Sane people are sad about what is going on in CS but Grover Norquist is happy as a pig in shale. This fascist pig has said that he wants to shrink the size of government down to the size that it can be drowned, killed or water boarded in the family bathtub. The right wingers and the GOP are always ready to throw seniors, the poor, the disabled, the working class under the bus to satisfy their reactionary ideology. They salivate and have orgasms at the thought of destroying Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unions. The rich and the powerful think they will do just fine in a defunded society and that they can blithely surf over the human wreckage. Eventually, even the rich and powerful will be bitten in the ass by the cruel destruction of human services and the proper functions of government.
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