And I despair for my adopted hometown (if you can call this sprawling mess of relocated transients a town).
South Florida is entirely dependent on its airports for its economic vitality, as does Central Florida's Orlando, and the aviation business is DOOMED. Air traffic into Florida's airports has dropped considerably, and the decline will accelerate from this point forward. As the travel & leisure business shrivels and the extinct snowbird dies ending its requirement for South Florida healthcare the population will flee looking for employment elsewhere.
Florida has no income tax (and I am not advocating one). It gets its revenues from sales taxes, primarily from the tourists formerly piling into Disney World, MGM, etc... Those tourists, and their tax dollars will no longer be coming south for the winter. Local Governments rely very heavily on property taxes, which are VERY high in proportion to the value of the (plummeting) properties. As more and more condo and home owners abandon their negative equity homes, the fewer remaining homeowners are going to be stuck with the tax bill - right at the time that the state is going to be sucking wind on sales taxes.
I think of this every time I drive by a Bank Atlantic or Bank United branch, or the condo complex going up next to my office in downtown Boca Raton. These banks will not survive, nor will these condo projects. The liquidation of South Florida is underway, and will take the better part of 10 years before officials recognize what is happening, even though it is unfolding, right now, before their eyes.
Right now, the local governments are still wasting precious taxpayer money on things like busting massage parlors, road expansion (who is going to be driving on these roads?), and using SWAT teams to serve search warrant's on marijuana users and murdering them in their own homes.
In a few years they won't have enough money to pay for legitimate police and fire protection, let alone murdering longtime home owning taxpayers for smoking marijuana.
Maybe the precipitous loss of tax dollars by local, city, and state governments is not such a bad thing.
Mentatt (at) yahoo (d0t) com
2 comments:
"Maybe the precipitous loss of tax dollars by local, city, and state governments is not such a bad thing."
I could not agree more. The future will look less like a high energy distopian nightmare (ala 1984/Brazil/Gattica), and more like a low energy one (aka The Road Warrior).
The burgeoning fascist police state/military-industrial-prison complex will not survive the powerdown (thankfully), but it will try mightily. It's what Rome did, why should we be any different.
Unfortunately, that is pretty much how I see it, too.
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