Baltimore is an underrated city for quality of life…if you can manage to avoid the crime and keep from getting murdered, anyway. Great people, great food, amazing history, lots of family-friendly things to do. I lived there for a dozen years, it’s a great place. But Charm City may soon be bankrupt, according to a report ordered by Mayor Rawlings Blake.
The Associated Press obtained the 10 year financial forecast ahead of its release to the public on Wednesday.
It shows the city will accumulate a $745 million budget deficit over the next decade because of a growing gap in how much the city earns and the amount it spends.
That deficit would be even bigger at $2 billion if you factor in what the city needs for infrastructure repairs and retiree health care benefits.
According to the report, if the city does not enact major reforms, it will go bankrupt.
Like GM’s strange configuration in relation to its product and its lavish union benefits plan, Baltimore is becoming a retiree health plan with a hollowing-out city attached. Population is decreasing, moving out to the suburbs or even out of the high-tax state into nearby Delaware, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Union demands and Democrat largesse are at the heart of the city’s fiscal problems, along with a voting populace that tends to elect clowns and corruptocrats into leadership. The city’s and state’s Democrat leadership is likely to try remedying the situation with higher taxes, which will only make Baltimore’s predicament worse.
So, it’s not likely that Baltimore will right itself until it is absolutely forced to. Or it gets some kind of federal bailout.
Bryan, I don’t see them getting a bailout do you? Where did you live/work in Baltimore?
As Reagan might say, “here we go again”. You know that this will be blamed on Republican/rich/white people – past and present. Then will come some sort of bail out. But what happens next? Sometimes it seems like free market capitalism and socialism are quantum states and once a society allows weakening of the principles of the former, it is pulled inexorably to the latter. These half-free, half-Statist positions such as we have now are just not stable in the long run. Might as well go right to Socialism so the average historically unaware voter can experience the misery and so a movement back to freedom can start over again.
I think the issue is more state vs federal. We need to return power to the states. No bailouts.
How do you see that happening? Democrats/Progressives are all in on Federal power and control and the combined power of the Fed and the blue states is so much greater than the 14 scattered States that do not currently have at least one Democratic senator.
Yeah, Baltimore’s a great town. As long as you don’t venture beyond the Inner Harbor.
The solution for Baltimore politicians.
Raise taxes.
Borrow more money until the bond market won’t lend them any more.
Have the well-to-do taxpayers of Howard County, Montgomery County, Charles County, Calvert County, etc. provide them with a bailout.
Are there 20,000 of them willing to donate $10,000 per year for 10 years? Because that’s what it would take to make up a $2B shortfall.
FYI: Gov. O’Malley was the former mayor of Baltimore. He’s now attempting to re-create “the magic” of Baltimore at the state level as a springboard to Federal politics.
Isn’t Madame the Speaker-in-Waiting the product of a prominent Bawlmer political family?
No doubt she’d love to write the city a federal check on borrowed money — at least for as long as that scam lasts.
The sad thing is the people that voted the clowns in will “vote with their feet” and flee the city, but will continue the voting habits that caused them to flee. This disease eventually gets spread throughout the red states as well.
– after Katrina, let ‘em win a Super Bowl. Good for business.