Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.
— Mark Steyn, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, published in the summer of 2011.
San Bernardino on Tuesday became the third California city to seek bankruptcy protection in the last month and, while no one expects the state to be consumed by municipal insolvencies, other cities teeter on the abyss.
“There are likely to be more in the future, but it’s hard to know, since a lot of struggling cities may manage to work things out,” said Michael Coleman, a fiscal policy advisor for the California League of Cities. “Some cities may not go into a bankruptcy, but they may dissolve. They may cease to exist.”
— The L.A. Times today, in a piece titled, “Rising costs push California cities to fiscal brink — Throughout the state, local governments are slashing services to avoid bankruptcy. For some, it’s too late.” It’s accompanied by a photo essay, “California cities in bankruptcy.”
Related: In his PJ Media column today, Michael Walsh writes, “This horror story by James Pethokoukis ought to scare the living daylights out of you and anyone else who cares about the future of the country soon to be formerly known as the United States of America…There follows a series of charts that are even more terrifying than the factoids, so please read the whole thing. And then think about this: what happens to a nation when the Party of Take becomes bigger than the Party of Give?
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