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.
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