This Space for Rent

Plunging towards being a third-world country, American style.

Jackson County is closing their library system. Why? Because nobody wants to pay for it. The Federal government, which was paying a subsidy in exchange for taking back land grants that were given to the Oregon and California RR, decided that US$7 million was TOO MUCH MONEY (after all, it takes the B*sh junta almost 40 minutes to transfer that much money to their good friends in the war profiteering industry), and the local taxpayers (Oregon is a state that loves rentiers, but hates public services) decided that wishing for the federal cash fairy was a better bet than continuing to support a library levy.

The sad thing is that it isn't much better elsewhere. Canada appears to be in the deadly clutches of their own bunch of (trained by the Evil Party, of course! The Evil Party can't govern worth shit, but they're spectacularly good at looting the public treasury, then fiddling while Rome burns) conservative con artists, and even the wealthy parts of the United States are being slowly crunched by tax transfers to poor but reliably Evil Party supporting states (Oregon, even though it's a reliably Evil Party supporting state once you get outside of Multnomah County, isn't actually reliable enough to get the big tax transfers that other parts of the country get. And, to make matters worse, Oregon is still natural resource heavy, so it's in the Evil Party's interest to keep the state poor so the citizens will accept the systematic resource stripping that the Evil Party has traditionally excelled at.)

But at least rentiers don't have to pay any taxes on their ill-gotten gains, and that's the important thing. So what if the USA will resemble a pre-Chavez Venezuela? The rich don't care that they're rich as much as they care that everyone else is poor.