A few months ago, the Castro government announced that it was going to discharge five hundred thousand of its bureaucrats. It could no longer afford to pay their salaries. Today, the State of Illinois announced severe cuts, if not total eliminations, in its Drug rehabilitation budgets. Yesterday, the State of Michigan ordered the Detroit schools to cut spending immediately by fifty percent, close half of its schools, and put 60 students in a class. Last week, the State of Wisconsin tried to make bureaucrats pay half of their pensions and more of their medical care, prompting near-riots. No one knows how much longer California’s dreaming of ongoing spending can last.
All these things are provoking an unprecedented flood of “I told you so’s.” from smarter people. They have, in fact, been predicting the collapse of the left and have had their intellectual abilities confirmed by the growing failures.
One may reasonably assume that the collapsing governments of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, and all the others that find themselves in deeper trouble than ever have related causes: overspending to pamper the most favored groups and sub-groups among them has finally reached the point that those who are grossly over-taxed to enrich their more privileged neighbors are nearing the state where they’ve decided to “live free, or die”.
P. S. Update: According to http://www.therealcuba.com/ , Cuba has shown itself to have backed away from the government’s recent plan to reduce expenditures by terminating 500,000 bureaucrats from the public payroll. Many of those destined for discharge no longer go to work. They now draw their salary for sitting around their houses, where, one may assume, they spend their days thinking deep thoughts about a wide variety of things.
Their government was so afraid of them rioting that they decided it would be cheaper to appease them by keeping them on salary. They are saving money by not buying materials and supplies for the projects with which the newly-idled workers were involved.
This will not last long.
