The City of Denver, Colorado announced today that each and everyone of the 15,000 city employees will have to take anywhere from two to seven mandatory unpaid furlough days at sometime in the remaining seven months of 2025.
That includes all 1,400 of the city of Denver employees that work at Denver International Airport, despite the airport operating independently of Denver's general fund.
See, the Denver general fund is short some fifty million dollars this year.
Fifty million dollar shortfall...hmmm...property tax revenue in Denver has more than doubled in the past ten years...sales tax revenue since 2018 is up an estimated 30% (or a bit higher - really difficult to get accurate numbers on that from the opaque government agencies that control access to those numbers).
BTW, Denver receives around 45% of it's operating revenue from sales taxes and fees, which is unusually high for a city - for comparison, the city of Boston, which is located in that wonderful state nick-named "Tax-achusetts" by it's residents, receives about 15% of it's operating revenue from sales taxes and fees, Kansas City gets about 22% of it's operating budget from sales taxes and fees, and Seattle receives 23% of it's operating revenue from same.
Those furloughs being due to a $50,000,000 shortfall in Denver's operating budget really begs the question, "What the hell has happened to all that money?"
Oh, wait a minute...there was that ninety million dollars ($90,000,000) for migrant aid that was made public a year ago.
Or course, that could just be correlation, not causation.
I know what you're thinking right about now. You're thinking, "WTF Cripes, you wrote a diatribe basically in favor of migration about about a year ago, didn't you?"
The answer to that is yes, yes I did. However, I also wrote a diatribe suggesting that all those NGO's (non-governmental organizations, such as the International Rescue Committee, Alight, Catholic Charites USA, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Church World Services, etc.) aiding and abetting the migration of all those people from (primarily) Central and South America making their way to Denver fork over the $$$ to house, cloth and feed those very same migrants.
I mean, to just drop people off at the doorstep of a government agency and say, "here you go, now use all that money you are taking from the citizenry of your fair city to house, cloth and feed these poor and unfortunate migrants." is not just incredibly unethical, it's also incredibly immoral.
A huge percentage of the NGO's are church organizations...churches that operate tax free...why are they not being made responsible for what they have wrought?
Yeah, I know, a few actually are making efforts to help ease the budget strain caused by the migrant crises, but not nearly enough.
And all those services the religious organizations are providing for the migrants that have landed in Denver? Again, this might just be correlation and not causation, but the past year has seen a huge uptick in the homeless population in these parts...the natural-born homeless population, who are suddenly finding it very difficult to find available short-term housing and other necessary services.
But what the hell do I know, heck, I'm not even posting links to sources for the numbers I'm using in this little rant.
Maybe you should get on the good ol' Google and double-check those numbers...I could be lying or at the least exaggerating...or maybe I'm possibly even underreporting the numbers...either way, it'll give you something to do.
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