It is well known that the Golden State is experiencing economic troubles.
In fact, 10 California cities are poised to declare bankruptcy. Stockton has recently been given the go ahead to lead this fiscal emergency parade:
On Monday a judge ruled that Stockton, Ca. could enter bankruptcy. The city of 291,000 counts among its woes hundreds of millions of dollars in retirement promises it hasn’t funded and hasn’t been able to afford since a steep economic decline began several years ago. Today, unemployment in the Stockton metro area is a daunting 15.5 percent, which doesn’t do much for the local tax base.
Los Angeles residents just elected a new mayor who will be forced to deal with budget shortfalls and the long term consequences of sweetheart pension deals for government employees.
Eric Garcetti will be Los Angeles’ next mayor.By 3 a.m. Wednesday, with 100 percent of the votes counted, Garcetti had received 54 percent of the vote, making him L.A.’s first elected Jewish mayor.
Garcetti has his work cut out for him. One LA department is now making plans to distribute free condoms via bus to city residents:
The wheels on the bus go round and round all throughout Los Angeles…passing out free condoms.The County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health announced this week that it will be sending a 40-foot-long bus filled with free condoms throughout the city of angels, encouraging them to “suit up” with condoms to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.“Suit Up” was the winning theme from the city’s condom wrapper design competition. All condoms distributed by the city’s condom bus will feature the bow-tie logo.LA residents can also check the condom mobile’s website to find a stop nearest them.The health department’s goal is to not just distribute one million condoms, but rather one million and one before the bus’s tour is finished. The health department has also partnered up with local LGBT sports leagues to help spread awareness.
Garcetti and other LA leaders may want to consider an analysis by Michael S. Greve, a professor at George Mason University School of Law. In the Library of Law and Liberty, he wrote on Conservatives, Condoms and Compassion:
Henry Olsen is searching for a distinction between a hand up and a handout—between the uplifting and the tawdry, the compassionate and the grasping. But that’s hard to articulate even on paper, and harder still to observe in practice. And against it stands liberalism’s limitless, all-encompassing ethos: If I can’t have my condom, you might as well kill widows and orphans. If conservatism and the GOP often seem disconnected from “average persons” and their need, in distress, for government help, maybe that’s because they sense that before you can explain the needed distinctions, you have to explain that enough is enough and indeed, altogether too much. That strikes me as the right impulse. The hard question is whether even that much, or that little, can still be explained.
If Garcetti doesn’t want his city to march into bankruptcy court, he should practice some fiscal “tough love.”
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