Ouch! This hits close to home. Living outside Cincinnati I have to say I am surprised. Cincinnati’s city government has a long tradition of being dysfunctional but this exceeds their low standards by quite a margin. It is as bad as the public pension problems in Illinois and California. Like most cities Cincinnati has been battling the migration of their tax base to the suburbs. It will be practically impossible for the city government to tax their way out of this mess. This leaves the city government with several really bad plans for solving this problem. My guess is that all of the plans will involve serious cutbacks in the pension benefits. With so many cities and states promising extremely generous pension benefits that are also being forced to reduce their staff due to low tax revenues, I doubt the US recession will end until most of the cities and states resolve their pension problems. This is a particularly thorny problem for the Democrats since they have shown an ineptness for dealing with major city issues such as poverty. As Glenn Beck pointed out last year in a commentary on poverty, Cincinnati has not had a Republican mayor since 1984. It looks like the Democrats own both of these issues.
MORE PUBLIC-PENSION PROBLEMS, IN CINCINNATI: