Posted by Bob Lord
This one has to be short — billable work to do. But I just stumbled on to a must read, How America Became a Third World Country, by Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford. They take us out ten years from today, after ten years under sequestration. It's an ugly picture and, scarily enough, quite plausible.
Here's the first paragraph, as a teaser:
The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.
Welcome to Austerity America! Enjoy.