http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/business/05cities.html?ref=business
The States don't have the money either.
Mortgage foreclosures and no job industry has caused all of this.
MERS has made owning a title to your home an impossibility, rather than bail the banks again isn't it time we bailed out our cities states and municipalities.
Those mortgage payments your making to those banks, if paid to the states and towns of our interests, would go a long way in healing the damage that the banking industry and Wall Street have done to this country. It's time to stop playing nurse maid for the life styles of the rich and famous, and start helping out our own, before there is nothing left to help out.
When Harrisburg borrowed money from the state they used it to pay for bond interest, not their people. If they don't pay the interst they can't borrow anymore. Which is what got everyone in this same fix in the first place.
Now Harrisburg is calling on the state again. On Friday, the city said it could not meet its next payroll without money from the state’s distressed cities program.
Across the country, a growing number of towns, cities and other local governments are seeking refuge in similar havens that many states provide as alternatives to federal bankruptcy court. Pennsylvania will have 20 cities and smaller communities in its distressed-cities program if Harrisburg receives approval. Michigan has 37 in its program; New Jersey has seven; Illinois, Rhode Island and California each have at least one. This is on top of troubled housing, power and hospital authorities.
The increasingly common pleas for state assistance — after two relatively quiet decades — reflect the yawning local budget deficits that have appeared in the last two years.
As tax revenue has fallen, the cost of providing labor-intensive government services, like teaching and policing, has proved hard to reduce.
