20% Cuts Across City, As We're $522 M Short
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom today asked the heads of all city departments to trim their budgets by 20 percent, and prepare to cut an...
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Jay said:
November 20, 2009 2:14 PM
Reply
If the citizens of the city are having to cut their budgets, to hit the Food Bank, Goodwill, etc. then why shouldn't the City be forced to have cutbacks?
The "solution" that the Supervisors will come up with will be, as always, more taxes.
But wait: when the economy recovers, will the taxes go down? Fat chance. The government payroll will get bloated in the meantime, and the cycle will repeat again in the next downturn.
I can predict, right now, exactly where the cuts will be: in the places where it hurts the people the most (which is _different_ from where the fat is). The cuts will be implemented by shutting down parks and other programs that don't really cost that much, but hurt the general population at large. The idea behind these cuts, and I've seen this many times, is to hurt the people so they'll go along with the tax increases. They could just as easily save the money elsewhere by cutting their slush funds and pet projects; but they'll never do that. They'll always pick items which inflict maximum pain. For example: in a $80 Billion state budget, they're cutting the $14 million state Parks budget to shut down the Parks.
I know people who've been forced to take pay cuts (or face layoffs) in this downturn. Why shouldn't the City employees take a 20% pay cut across the board? There is rampant overtime and overstaffing in the city; start with that first. Have we all forgotten the nurse who was making $350K/year ? http://www.sfgate.com/webdb/sfpay/