The American Spectator : Drink Won't Save Us

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Drink Won't Save Us

Bankrupt buses, pricey beer, and bad wars.

It's not hard to see how we're bankrupting ourselves. Not even a rich country can make it through this level of incompetency and corruption.

Locally, I drive home from work here in Pittsburgh listening to people calling the talk shows to complain about how the reduced bus schedules aren't getting them to work on time.

The bus system is running critically in the red in spite of a 7% county tax on beer, wine, and liquor that was imposed three years ago to bail out the transit system. On top of all the other local and state subsidies to the bus system, this new liquor tax transfers about $27 million a year from the county's boozers to the buses and still the transit system is projected to be $60 million in the red next year. We just can't drink enough to keep everything afloat.

"I'm paying more and getting less," grumbled one caller. "With the nation's highest parking taxes in Pittsburgh, I can't afford to drive downtown and now my bus is gone. What am I supposed to do, sit home with the bus drivers who are milking early retirements?"

Then the bus drivers call in, saying, like Nixon, that they're not crooks.

"I just went down there and applied for a job when I was 20 years old," explained one driver. "So now I'm 47 and been retired for two years. That was the deal I was offered. Any of the callers who are complaining could have gone down there and got the same job for the same deal."

True, but we'd still be broke no matter who went down back then and got the job because we can't afford to pay people to do nothing for four decades just because they worked for two or three decades.

It's like the Social Security problem. Starting out, there were plenty of workers per retiree. You worked your whole life and retired at 65 and died at 66, if you were lucky. Life expectancy in the U.S. was 61 years when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935.

That was my grandfather's story. He was in the coalmines for half a century and then retired in March and died in November. His biggest break in life was at the end when he got to drink his homemade cherry wine on the porch for one whole summer without having to go into the mines.

There was no red ink. The four dozen workers chipping in to cover his retirement checks for eight months didn't have to borrow the money from China.

But the bus driver on the radio was right. He didn't hold a gun to anyone's head in order to get his deal. Well, at least not as an individual. But have a union boss tell a politician that he has a bloc of votes that can derail the politician's gravy train and it's not much different than aiming an AK-47 at his forehead, as we've seen via many a bloated contract in the public sector.

And so we've ended up with no money, unhappy riders, unhappy drivers, pricey beer, a failed transit system, and a partially completed and totally unnecessary mass transit tunnel under the Allegheny River that will stretch for a grand total of 1.2 miles and cost half a billion dollars when it's all over.

No nation in the world has ever paid more per mile to move people from a shrinking downtown to watch their subsidized baseball team drop another game.

More globally but just as madly, we're now fighting three mismanaged wars in the Middle East while we're $14 trillion in the hole (more precisely, $14,223,405,410,454.55 as I'm writing this sentence), and shooting off missiles at $700,000 a pop with not one Arab sheik offering to pick up the tab.

The crazy part is that we don't know if the rebels we're helping in Libya are al Qaeda. You'd think we'd know that information, given that we spend an estimated $50 billion a year in 18 "intelligence" agencies (maybe it's even higher -- the spending totals are classified).

"Even after a month of demonstrations in Tunisia had brought about the downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, on January 14th, some White House officials, along with American and Israeli intelligence experts, put the likelihood of a copycat revolution in Egypt at no more than twenty percent," reported Wendell Steavenson in the New Yorker of March 14. "The hundred and twenty-five million dollars' worth of algorithmic computer modeling that American military and intelligence agencies had ordered over the previous three years to forecast global political unrest didn't seem to be of much help, either."

Doesn't anything work anymore?

About the Author

Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise and an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (24) | Leave a comment

Dee See| 4.5.11 @ 6:45AM

----NON-CON-job-serving, NON-RED China
sellout and treason conservatives are wondering
what gives with American Spectator going
into its 3rd week of burying the yet unfolding,
GE design flawed, Fukishima disaster.

This 3/11/2011 'E-vent', after the 1/11/2010
Haiti quake, and the mega Tsunami on MAO's
Birthday in 2005 really -----UH, merits the
sustained, unflinching, quality spotlight and
scrutiny wouldn't you say?

ESP. as the NYT and everyone else is covering-up
those California tap and rain water radiation levels that have gone up 181X (18000%).
(SEE Berkeley monitors online)

It really is kind of an issue------------------------

John Daniel| 4.5.11 @ 7:26AM

Actually, what passes for "work" today would have been merely leisure pursuits to the founders. Steel Mills represent work, lawyering doesn't. Though will be there latter part of the month for the NRA convention so will be contributing to the local revenue....

diviz| 4.5.11 @ 10:49AM

many of the founding fathers were lawyers. They might not appreciate having their job called recreation.

PaulyD| 4.5.11 @ 7:37AM

Piper payin' time is here.

Hillel| 4.5.11 @ 8:52AM

Don't kid yourself. The "learned professions" are dong real work. The question is should it be more remunerative than Laboring? The other question is why are there so many more "goldbricks" than there used to be?

Hillel| 4.5.11 @ 8:52AM

Doctor_X| 4.5.11 @ 9:09AM

The real problem is all the free drinks the D.Sc. students at R.M.U. get at the Hoilday Inn.
If we had to pay for them the county would have easily closed that $60 million budget gap!

Louis Jenkins| 4.5.11 @ 9:10AM

What will be answer? Bankrupt! This whole nation is going down the tubes really fast. NRA convention as a city money making scheme? It's pretty bad when cities have to look toward conventions to keep its accounting records in the black. It's so much easier to raise taxes, and let the sinful pay for its ride. It cannot continue. When the price of a tax exceeds the value of a product, people will go out of the city, for good.

Wally| 4.5.11 @ 10:21AM

The sad part is the Convention folks here are in as bad shape as the transit system, and for many of the same reasons. They could have an NRA convention on a monthly basis and still see nothing but red ink. The city is already BK, now the various appendages are following suit. Lets elect another Democrat...

Ken in Tyler| 4.5.11 @ 10:22AM

To directly answer your question, yes something still works. Unfortunately, we have been unwilling to put it to work. I speak of course, of the Constitution. Even many of those elected to Congress now freely admit much of what they do is outside its limits. The restoration of adherence to this marvelous social contract will take us down the path of recovery. An unlikely option for the moocheers and power-hungry politicians of our day.

Steve A| 4.5.11 @ 10:43AM

I think it would be quite entertaining to hear a liberal complaining about his lack of subsidized bus routes to another libneral who worked for 20 years & retired & is subsidized by the other liberal who can't get a ride to work to pay the taxes to continue to fund the retired liberal's pension.

Liberal #1: "Hey, I can't get a ride on the bus to work so I can fund your retirement."

Liberal #2: "Not my problem, I was promised I could work for 20 years & get paid for 60 years."

Liberal #1: " Well, maybe you & your pals should rotate back out of retirement on altermate days so we can continue to fund your pension."

Liberal #2: "No way, I may miss the Jerry Springer show."

Liberal #1: "Well damn, lets raise taxes then."

Liberal #2: " Yes, this is the answer. Especially since you no longer have a job since I won't drive the bus. Just go collect your 99 weeks & come watch Jerry with me."

Liberal #1: " Cool, but how do we blame Republicans since our city is & has been governed Governed by liberal Democrats for years."

Liberal #2: " No problem, let the media do it for you."

PolishKnight| 4.5.11 @ 11:01AM

I wish I was listening/calling into that radio show.

The bus driver's claim that "anyone" could have walked into the office and gotten that job is a bald faced lie. Many of those positions are earmarked for friends of existing workers, relatives of bosses, union paybacks, etc. It's like saying "anyone" could apply for the job of Soprano henchman.

Ned| 4.5.11 @ 11:55AM

And even if it were true - Steve A's comment perfectly encapsulates the problem - public employee unions in collusion with Democrats promise the unsustainable - 60 years of pay for 20 years of work, and retirement at FORTY FIVE?!?!?

Mike Hawk| 4.5.11 @ 12:39PM

PA's former Mayor (and p/t Gov.) Fast Eddy Spendell set up a similar problem with SEPTA in the Phillufya region. Now that Spendell isn't in Harrisburg, transportation funds can't be funneled to SEPTA anymore to buy votes to re-elect Fast Eddy. Is that a pipe band I hear in the distance??

Mike Hawk| 4.5.11 @ 12:40PM

........might be the fat lady tuning up.

cicero| 4.5.11 @ 2:47PM

There is no problem with government workers retiring after 20 years of work - as long as they don't start collecting the pension checks until they reach the age of 66. That, and the abolition of the stacked pensions, would solve the problem.

Occam's Tool| 4.5.11 @ 4:36PM

Yes, something works, and Debbie Schlussel (the "I" in the quote below) has scooped it:

"Yesterday, Israel unsealed an indictment against Abu Sisi, and I was proven correct. Not only is he a TOP HAMAS operative, he’s the “Rocket Godfather.” Yes, Abu Sisi is in charge of developing and upgrading HAMAS missiles and directing the rocket attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. And not only that, but he is one of the top officials of HAMAS’ military wing, the brains behind the terrorist organization’s plans and attacks on Israelis and others. His hand stretches from Syria to Mecca. Abu Sisi founded and developed HAMAS’ military academy and also knows where kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit is being held, which is the main reason he was captured. "

Many of our government agencies that work you will never hear of, because nothing goes wrong. For example, I was the psychiatrist for the Alabama Chain Gang, which was an international news story in the mid 90s. But you'd have to work to get my name, and the reason is that none of them ever had a serious suicide attempt, much less a success. So no one looked at their psychiatric services, despite the MSM attention on the "barbarity" in Alabama.

That being said, our Federal system is a disaster in many ways, which is why you have stories about it all the time.

e track from saq| 4.5.11 @ 7:23PM

It's entropy,the slow and no good people are robbing the quick and bright.Like Maxwell's little demon separating those that are speedy from those that are not,we have got to stop from being dragged down by the slow and Obamafied.What happens if the whole nation becomes nothing but takers.Ugly.

Stammon| 4.5.11 @ 10:23PM

dee See you are talking through your tin foil hat. Look here for Rad levels:
http://www.epa.gov/japan2011/r.....co-bg.html

See? No change.

Dee See| 4.6.11 @ 12:31AM

---FURTHER

As we write, as sources tell us monitors
picking up the MASSIVE radiation levels
in California are being 'turned off for re-adjustment'

YAHOO News:

MASSIVE very recent loss loss (since winter!)
of the ozone layer.

A signature of major HAARP discharge-----------

DO get with the DE-PROGRAM kids!

REALLY

TRULY

ABSOLUTELY

Pelligrino| 4.6.11 @ 4:02AM

Thank you, Mr. Reiland. You are the first one to mention in print (from what I've seen) the laughably nonsensical repeated government statements that we don't know who 1) the men in the streets of Cairo were/are, and 2) who the Libyan rebels are.

Please add to the LONG list of bloated, pricey 18 US intel agencies, the State Department, US AID, the Peace Corps, Dept. of Commerce, etc.

How can we not know who or what the indigenous Libyan oppostion is? (We've known to keep an eye on Khadafi for 41+ years & probably looked to stoke his oppositon at times, yes?)

And, what, can we not confer with allied intel and diplmatic agencies in France, Spain, England, and Italy to compare/butress conclusions? It is not like Libya or Egypt have been closed countries (like Belarus).

Europeans and businessmen have been wandering all about those countries for decades now.

We should know down to the eyebrows who and what leads these oppositions.

And -- to get back to the core issue of national budgets & overspending -- close 10 of the 18 intel agencies TOMORROW.

For the Pittsburg bus drivers and ALL those working toward pensions: No payouts until one is 60 years old.

directtohomeappliances.com| 4.6.11 @ 5:21AM

Sure, incompetency and corruption is what will draw us next to poor soil, some where down.
It has finished many countries and we don't want it here.
As a people we have to do something about it and know it is for our own benefits.

Dennis Duggan| 4.7.11 @ 4:25PM

No Ralph, someone might hold a gun to your head if you refuse to pay taxes to the bus driver who retired at 45. That's one of the reasons the bus company should be private, like it was when I was a kid.