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Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 08:32 PM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

Detroit City is broke. Detroit has declared bankruptcy. More than half of Detroit’s population has left town, vanished, gone south. Families and businesses have left a decaying shell of a once thriving community. Vacated buildings are falling down, occupied only by starving sewer rats and drug addicts. How could this happen to a city that was once the automobile capital of the world? There is an answer, but tragically the answer raises another question, and this one much closer home: Is Greenville, South Carolina, following in the footsteps of this once thriving city and could Greenville become another Detroit?

What destroyed Detroit? What are the similarities with Greenville that could bring financial disaster? 

A case can be made that labor union demands broke the back of the United States auto industry and drove business overseas. Americans began buying Japanese, German and Korean cars because they provided a greater value for the dollar. American companies could not compete.

Regardless of the cause, companies and workers left Detroit. That reduced the taxpayer base needed to support the bureaucracy. City workers were unionized and demanded more and more pay and benefits as the tax base shrank. There were insufficient funds to provide adequate law enforcement, to catch and prosecute criminals. Criminals became politicians and politicians became criminals, as mendacity replaced truth and candor.

As the tax base shrank, and the city borrowed more and more money, the crooks and union bosses demanded and took more and more of it. Now the day of reckoning has arrived. The big losers will be the investors who purchased city bonds and the remaining residents and businesses who will be soaked with increasingly higher taxes.  This will also impact some mutual funds and retirement accounts across the country.

The federal government may step in and have the federal taxpayers fund the union member pension funds that the city can no longer afford.

Greenville is heavily invested in the German and domestic automotive industries.  At the same time the President of the United States and the Mayor of Greenville are striving to replace cars with bicycles, using a variety of regulations and tactics. The state legislature and county council, through planning, laws, zoning and restrictive regulations on the use of private property are underwriting these efforts. At the same time, most elected officials are in denial and prefer to have their heads in the sand than to deal with the reality and impact of their involvement in the implementation of United Nations Agenda 21. In brief, Agenda 21 is an evil plan for coalitions of government and non-government entities to control every aspect of human life in this country. Implementation of Agenda 21 is fueled by greed for money and power over others.

Each time a business closes in Greenville County or government agencies remove property from the tax rolls to build hospitals, schools, stadiums, office buildings, parks and bike trails, current tax law requires that the remaining small businesses and individual property owners pay more to cover the revenue lost. Taxpayers must also pick up the cost of operating and maintaining additional schools, parks, trails, etc. That is why individual taxpayers see substantial increases in their taxes on real estate, cars and boats even when no one has voted to raise taxes.

The exception to all the rules, the laws and the South Carolina Constitution is the Greenville County School District. The coming potential disaster caused by the Greenville County School District is not the fault of the teachers or administrators. They are employees of the twelve-member school board. It was the school board members elected by the people of the District who circumvented the state constitution, exceeded the legal borrowing limit by more than ten-fold and created the potentially disastrous financial crisis of which many county residents are unaware.

The school board in effect mortgaged the private property owned by Greenville County taxpayers for more than one billion dollars. The school board has voted to raise taxes twice already this year, yet they continue to borrow, build and taxpayers remain silent.

Should taxes exceed the ability of people to pay due to economic problems caused by Obamacare, or another crisis, Greenville could become another Detroit.

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