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Location: where you sip the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
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ST. PAUL, Minn. – Minnesota is deep in the hole financially, but the state still owns a premier golf resort, a sprawling amateur sports complex, a big airport, a major zoo and land holdings the size of the Central American country of Belize.
Valuables like these are in for a closer look as 44 states cope with deficits.
Like families pawning the silver to get through a tight spot, states such as Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts and Illinois are thinking of selling or leasing toll roads, parks, lotteries and other assets to raise desperately needed cash.
Cash-strapped states weigh selling roads, parks - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081227/ap_on_re_us/meltdown_selling_assets_2 - broken link)
Last edited by Waterlily; 12-27-2008 at 08:59 PM..
Reason: coptright issues
The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.
Thomas Jefferson
No wonder the top 1% in the US own 80% of the wealth in the US.
the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a forerunner of the Austrian School of economics, emphasized the "creative destruction" of capitalism — the fact that market economies undergo constant change. At any moment of time, posits Schumpeter, there are rising industries and declining industries. Schumpeter, and many contemporary economists influenced by his work, argue that resources should flow from the declining to the expanding industries for an economy to grow, but they recognized that sometimes resources are slow to withdraw from the declining industries because of various forms of institutional resistance to change.
certainly that theory makes more sense than what we are doing now, which is throwing money at bad industries that are failing us. why not let private enterprises run some of these things? the private enterprise takes on the risk (instead of the taxpayer) and they will be more interested in managing it properly because they need to see a profit. the government is happy to run at a deficit, as evidenced by all of the state budgets. of course this would only work if the states stopped spending and there is no guarantee that if they got more money they wouldn't just go spend the money!
Don't the roads and parks belong to the taxpayer? I want to know what the money raised will be used for. Maybe these states need to cut spending and stop raping the taxpayer.
Back in the 70's and early 80's (for those of you old enough to remember), the Japanese were buying up golf courses, resorts, restaurants, you name it. They had a very vibrant economy, more so than ours. Our money flowed to the Japanese, who at the time were producing higher-quality equipment than we were.
Hah! Now look at how the tables have turned! The Japs have been in a deflationary depression for about 15 years now!
But the rising stars today are Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Magnificent cities...beautiful skylines, oil money, gold trading centers. Let them have their day. When the day is over, they will sell out just as the Japanese did. Yes, these things all belong to We The People.
But we can let them "borrow" it...in exchange for their money, of course!
The reason the states are selling off their infrastructure is because the politicians do not have the (insert 5 letter word for) intestinal fortitude to MAKE THE HARD DECISIONS. I recently heard a news article about an area of (IIRC) Chicago where the current administration had sold off the PARKING METERS. The "private enterprise" (which is NOT always more efficient than government) plans to raise the fees MORE THAN DOUBLE in the next year, and then continue to raise them to (IIRC) 4 or 5 times what they are now.
In TX the state spent all of their roads budget buying rights of way and doing the initial engineering for new roads, then said "oh, we don't have the money to buld the roads" and sold off the investment to a foreign corp to build TOLL ROADS, and guaranteed the corp. that the state would build NO COMPETING roads for the next 75 years. All this because the politicians kept buying their reelection with "no new taxes" pledges. No one took a "no new tolls" pledge.
The good news is the private companies will likely be much more efficient running and maintaining the facilities.
The bad news is the government cannot do math and are selling the infrastructure at much less than fair value to solve current problems.
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