Saw a TV interview with an elected official of a small town in California. He came into office and realized they ahd to do something. Their pension costs had gone up so much – from something like $10M/yr in 2000 to around $80M/yr today – that they finally had to just start firing people. The people they fired were saying how devastated they were, how they did not know where they could go to find work, or what they were going to do. One thing they did know was that they should not have been laid off and that the money required should come “from somewhere” and “There must be a way for us to be more efficient, to cut somewhere else.”

“Let’s do a study to figure out how to become more efficient by consolidating and combining different governemt agency functions.” If I hear that one more time I may just have to grab my Enfield and go climb a clock tower.

In Punta Gorda, Florida one officials came up with an idea. The city had built its economy almost entirely on building houses for people to move there. A large percentage of the population were construction workers. The real estate bubble bursting had hit them very hard. The official wanted to use the city’s emergency fund to just build some stuff. That would give its citizens something to do, some income to keep them from losing their houses. So if you have too many empty buildings the thing to do is just build some more.

It is amazing how often the self-licking ice cream cone gets reinvented. Maybe Punta Gorda can build some clock towers.