Sunday, February 16, 2014

Harmonic Convergence

Having soaked in the Hot Tub of Debt Blogging and worked at Catholic Charities giving food to the poor, here's a scenario that I can't get out of my head: Cuts to government employee pensions hitting at the same time that the Catholic Church is slashing services to deal with attacks from the government and gay activists.

It could happen and pretty easily at that.

Here's part one.
(Reuters) - Detroit has circulated a financial plan that requires significant concessions from its pension funds and bondholders and declares that an interest-rate obligation that helped drive the city into bankruptcy is a disputed claim that is not part of the settlement.
Part two can be seen in the government assault on Little Sisters of the Poor and gays successfully suing various traditionalist wedding vendors like bakeries and photographers.

Increasing the number of needy elderly while wiping out organizations that serve them can't be a good combination.

5 comments:

adagioforstrings said...

I believe Obama and Democrats are enacting the Cloward and Piven strategy of collapsing the current US system so they can fundamentally transform it.

tim eisele said...

Before we hold up Catholic Charities as being an alternative to the Government, this is from the "Finances" section of the Wikipedia page about them:

"In 2010, Catholic Charities had revenues of $4.7 billion, $2.9 billion of which came from the US government."

Comment?

K T Cat said...

Tim, the government uses Catholic Charities as a distribution arm for much of its aid. The reason for this is that because it is staffed with volunteers whose sole goal is to aid the poor rather than to climb career ladders, we are orders of magnitude more efficient. Here in San Diego, we're given money to buy canned and dry goods which we then bag and distribute as our "commodities" package. The labor cost for this is zero.

Not only that, we work with a local center for autistic children and the kids come in and do the bagging for free. It's excellent therapy for them. Their teachers tell us that since they've given the kids useful tasks like this, they've noticed a huge improvement in attitude and behavior.

Once bigots like us are safely out of the way, you can look forward to career civil servants doing these jobs.

Forward!

K T Cat said...

Adagio, I'm convinced you're right. Sadly, since the Obamaphiles know nothing about how things actually work, they're simply wrecking the aid channels for the poor they claim to love.

K T Cat said...

One more thing for Tim. Thinking about what's in the commodities bag and what it costs to buy it, I would bet that adding, say, two GS-9s to our payroll would effectively eliminate us as a food distribution outlet as the labor costs would dwarf the cost of goods. On a normal day, we have 4 volunteers working to do customer intake, food bagging and general support tasks. When I've been there where there were just two of us, it's been almost impossible. I would guess that you'd be looking at 6 DMV workers to replace the 4 of us.

Good luck with that.