Bankrupt San Bernardino threatens to sue California over taxes

This is what passes as ‘business’ in California. One dis-functional Democratic run organization suing another dis-functional run Democratic run organization. What a joke. No wonder California is the laughing stock of the nation.

Cities around the country have been driven to the verge of bankruptcy by providing government employees unfunded and unsustainable pensions. It is simply impossible to tax the poor and middle class to provide pensions that allow government workers to retire 10-20 years earlier than private sector employees and give them pensions that are 2-10 times more than the average person sees from social security. Furthermore, government employees have been promised lifetime medical at a fraction of the cost of Medicare that they can access after 20-30 years of employment. I’ve already contributed to social security for 47 years, I can’t collect my full benefits unless I work another 7 years.

How about suing the police and fire unions, 2 thirds of revenue went to pay for police and fire fighters, the unions and pensions, that’s where all the money went

Funny to hear it is bankrupt and on top of that it just approved a salary increase for police… Just how stupid are these officials, and how dumb are those tax payers that waste taxes on government employees benefits

Eddie0063, the salary increase wasn’t “approved.”

The City Charter requires that these salaries increase because it uses a formula based on the salaries paid by ten other cities. The police and fire unions invested in a campaign several years ago to get the Charter changed in that way, and they were successful. Very few of the members actually live in the city; in fact, only eight of fire fighters do.

The municipalities in the formula, incidentally, have property-tax revenues double those in San Bernardino and sales-tax revenues triple those in the city.

peter1950, the State of California has a Democratic Governor and Democratic majorities in its legislature, but the City government of San Bernardino is crawling with Republican politicians that were put in office largely on the strength of their support from the police and fire-fighters unions, which gave literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to these officials.

The partisanship expressed sometimes regarding the municipal bankruptcy by people who have no real concept of San Bernardino politics is misplaced.