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Oct

18

Murphzilla Returns..

October 18, 2005 |

godzilla2.jpgThe city of Pittsburgh can’t get rid of this foolishness soon enough.

In the last week, Mayor Murphy decided to blame non profits for not forking up enough money to help the city balance its budget. You see, rather than cutting FAT, BLOAT and STINK from the budget as would any private entity, Mr. Murphy instead wishes to blame the non-profit community. You know, the hospitals that don’t turn the poor away from the emergency room if they are seriously in bad shape. The charities that help feed and dress poor people. The charities that build houses for others. They are the evil ones, you see?

Murphzilla also hits a new high of stink by making the statement that nonprofits account for 40% of property ownership of the city. It turns out only 34% of the city property is tax exempt, and two thirds of that can be attributed to the ever growing, bloating and resource gobbling called the Federal, State and City governments. Non-Profits only own 14% of the land.

Moreover, I guess the non-profit community does not do enough charity work or good for the benefit of the city, and Murphy would rather press on with moronic ideas like 5th and Forbes and other “development” projects that fail because of lack of demand in the first place (if you build it they will come was a movie, for Pete’s sake!). With each failure, the Murph and his cronies point the finger at not being given even more rope to hang more taxpayers — that the plans were not allowed to be big enough, and that’s why they failed so miserably. If only they had another $ 100 million of taxpayer’s money and were allowed to develop the “next phase” (and when that fails, the next, and the next, and the next…).

NEWSFLASH: There is not enough money in the world to make central planning work.

So, meanwhile, Murphy browbeats the non-profits publicly that they don’t give enough of their money to the fools down on Grant Street who have demonstrated that the best they can do is blow money like a drunken sailor (our apologies to all the drunken sailors around the world, who at least waste only their OWN money…)

Here’s an idea, Murph.. Why not find out why the City has a Workers’ Comp fund that pays out 10 times what the average city of Pittsburgh’s size does?? Typically a city of our size pays $2 million a year, but Pittsburgh city workers must be exceptionally unlucky with the fund costing taxpayers 26 million freaking dollars each year.

That’s as good a place as any to get your money, Murph. Or how about reviewing the most expensive police department in the nation?

The crying shame of it all is that while Murphy will be gone soon enough, the shoo-in will be long time city politician who presided alongside much of this mess in the last decade — Bob O’Conner. This city needs new blood, and instead the voters will bring to themselves more of the same.

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 100 times: Mencken was right. Democracy is the theory that the people deserve to get what they want. And good and hard.


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