Where Is Nero When You Need Him?

He probably wouldn't have been so rash in San Francisco since there are so few Christians to blame things on. But at least Nero had a plan. If it meant burning down half the city so he could build a new palace, well, them's the breaks.

After having lived the major part of my life in Sodom by the Bay, I still read the latest news from there with drop-jawed disbelief every time they set a new record for stupidity. And they've just given me another one of those moments. The "City That Knows How" certainly does. It knows how to make a bad situation worse. San Francisco is facing a $755 million deficit for 2011. So naturally the city has given its municipal retirees $170 million in cost-of-living increases. The original controller's estimate of the deficit for 2011 was a mere $360 million (yes, I said that tongue-in-cheek). But he forgot to include two factors. First, the cost-of-living increase for retirees already living on benefits that would make Midas blush. But there's also the small matter of the moronic San Francisco public.

On the November ballot, the mayor had gotten a budget amendment certified which would have required city employees to contribute to their own pensions and benefits. In the midst of the worst recession in memory and the biggest city budget shortfall since the Great Depression, this cost-cutting measure (Proposition B) was soundly defeated. It certainly caused me to think of the old adage that a people gets the form of government it deserves.

In their zeal to protect their cushy jobs, every public official except the mayor himself and every union official declared that worries about the budget increase were "overblown." Yet each of those hacks and liars knew full well that the retirement fund was a scandalous mess. Not only were the retirement benefits outrageous by any standard, but any first-grader with a pencil and a piece of paper could tell you have a problem when you take in contributions of $414 million and pay out $819 million. And that was last year. It's not as if there wasn't plenty of warning.

An outside neutral actuarial firm agreed upon by the city government and the unions to determine the state of the health of the San Francisco Employees' Retirement System (SFERS) found that the fund now has an unfunded liability of $1.6 billion. When asked directly about this staggering liability, the SFERS chief refused to respond to any questions. He didn't even bother to lie--he just refused to answer.

That same chief officer, Gary A, Amelio, came into office knowing about both the deficit and the projected unfunded liability. Yet he and his cronies encouraged the defeat of Prop B, and bald-facedly told the public that the fund was in sound condition. Then, he quietly allowed the cost-of-living increase to go through. While many citizens of the city are struggling to meet their monthly mortgage obligations and pay their monthly bills, the government, the Pacific Heights gazillionaires and the unions managed to defeat one of the few measures which might have given the budget crisis a small chance to be fixed.

There is a simple solution for this problem which all Democrats, liberals, welfare recipients, union employees and "progressives" know. Raise taxes and fees, at least as fast as you raise expenses. It's the Laugher Curve in action (ignore that pesky Laffer Curve). There are already multiple bills before the Board of Supervisors to accomplish this. Double the price of all city services. Massively increase the taxes on the few major businesses which haven't yet fled town. Double parking fees (they're already triple the national average). Etc, etc, ad nauseam.

How the city plans to survive is utterly beyond me. Mayor Gavin Newsom has not yet officially assumed his new position as California's Lieutenant Governor because he actually tried to stay behind and get some budget cuts and fiscal sanity before he left for Sacramento. Instead, he got a swift kick in the teeth from the Board of Supervisors and the voters. On the other hand, maybe he stuck around just to appreciate the proportions of San Francisco's fiscal disaster before he went on to deal with the even more massive state deficit in Sacramento.