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Pressure Is On IBM To Forgive Millions In IT Debt
coondoggie writes to tell us that several California state legislators are pressuring IBM to release the Costa school district from some $5 million of long-standing debt as a charitable donation. "The back story on this tale is that the school district owes IBM for computers ordered in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For one reason or another the computers were never used and no one now seems to be able to locate either the paperwork or the hardware. The school district experienced hard financial times and ultimately never paid Big Blue for the computers. In 1993 the district and IBM negotiated a long-term settlement that said the school district would pay the first of four $1.25 million installments beginning in 2008. Payments were deferred until then because 2008 was the year the district was scheduled to finish making state loan repayments under its previous loan plan, according to the Contra Costa story."
You mean other than the fact that you're supposed to be a union of states?
Idiot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you think that the federal government should step in and bail local communities out for stuff like this, then you know nothing about how the USA's government is structured. The federal government was specifically designed, with explicit verbiage, to stay out of local governments' decisions. In some cases, the line is blurry, and interstate commerce has generally been used as a back-door for the federal government to influence state and local governments, but the principle still remains.
We kinda had a civil war over this kind of thing.
In summary, you are ignorant, and doubly so for calling the grand-parent an idiot.
How about not letting governments borrow at all, except in time of war? Oh wait, that's already in the constitutions of the state and federal govt., but is conveniently ignored, since everything is a "National Emergency".
Bread, circuses, and whatever else paid for with someone else's money (in this case, far in the future) is what you get with a Democracy, which is why the US was founded as a Republic. Funny how this happens in a place run by Democrats.
No, I say that the line has to be drawn somewhere, and having the shareholders of IBM, or the taxpayers of significantly less prosperous counties (through the state government) bail out ultra-libs who hire flim-flam men and then keep putting off paying the piper is a good place to draw it. Contra Costa County is rich. Raise your sales taxes, raise your property taxes, or have your schools go bankrupt and get taken over by the state, which will fire your activist administrator bloat. I'm sick of the rest of the state subsidizing the bay area, which is the richest part of it.