Except that they voted it down because they want a full year tax break... and the Senate Democrats refuse to even vote on the bill that the House already passed supporting the full year tax break.

could you possibly be a little more disingenuous? You're exactly what's wrong with regards to the whole team politics thing.

Businesses followed the flight to the suburbs that started in the 50s and really picked up in the 60s. Since then, the city has thrown absurd amounts of money at anything to draw the businesses back downtown, much of the money coming from state and federal grants, which those suburbanites paid for indirectly. Midtown, the Fast Ferry, etc were largely paid for by non-city residents. The RCSD's budget, the highest in the region IIRC, draws a large chunk of its funds from the state, again, paid for by those suburbanites.

Rochester is its own worst enemy. It's desperately trying to live in the past but it's been in decline since the population peaked in the 50s. Look at Midtown, they spent tens of millions of dollars and offered all kinds of concessions to try to lure a few hundred jobs downtown. Why? Why can't Rochester accept that businesses don't want to be downtown? How can they justify $80 million to move 500 jobs within the metro area, a promise to create 300 more new jobs, and to top it all off, not even get a signed contract before setting the process in motion? That $80 million, if they had to spend it, could have gone to actually creating entirely NEW business in the city rather than trying to canabalize the suburbs because businesses prefer to be there.

Suburbanites don't want to go downtown... people that don't know the city are intimidated by the one way streets, the restrictions on left hand turns, paying for parking, their perception of violent crime (in general, the city isn't any more dangerous than the suburbs, but the triangle and a few bad neighborhoods give that impression), etc... so what does the city do? Add red light cameras to generate revenue and then add some more. They close down the few businesses that are open after 5pm, like forcing Nick Tahous to no longer be open 24 hours. Outside of a few friends that work downtown, most suburban people I know go downtown only if they absolutely have to - which basically means sporting events and a few government services that are only offered there. And you can completely forget the rural people that don't work there since they are completely overwhelmed.

Rather than actually accept Rochester for what it is and work to make it better, the city just can't get over the fact that it isn't what it was back in 1954 anymore. Times change and, like Kodak and their film business, they've refused to move on into the modern age. Instead, it's all about blaming the suburbs for Rochester not keeping up with the times. Maybe if they weren't so busy blaming everyone else and throwing crazy money around on gimmicks, they could actually do the things to make the city thrive again... but Rochester is so entrenched in its own dogma that I don't think I ever see that happening.

Rochester is paying around $22k per student annually for a graduation rate under 40% and of that 40%, a study showed only a handful are actually properly prepared to go to college. One of the school board members, Cynthia Elliott, proclaimed a couple years ago, that the failure of the school district was because they had too many white teachers and the students obviously couldn't relate to them.

The problem isn't that money isn't being spent on education (roughly double the national average) or that they don't have good teachers... the problem is the mentality of educators like the above, where they believe that the teachers are too good and, thus, can't teach the downtrodden city kids because the teachers, by simple virtue of being white, came from backgrounds that the city kids just can't grasp even though the plurality of the city is still white. Elliot, by the way, is black.

And that's Rochester in a nutshell. Everyone has their dogma and rather than seriously look at the underlying problems, their dogma dictates the cause and the solution. Meanwhile, the businesses and people that see things are only getting worse because of the dogma are leaving, if they already haven't, precisely because there are no real solutions forthcoming.

From the people I've known at Kodak, though they're now all gone, in addition to the problems you mention, nepotism was rampant... you got in based on who you knew regardless of your skill or ability (at least in the production lines). And once you were in, it was basically a job for life until the deep cutting started in the early 90s. Lots of people were paid to sit around and do nothing simply because, well, someone got them a job.

Then on top of that, they got obsessed with PC issues... people got fired for not wanting to have various social agendas pushed in the workplace. You either toed the line or you were gone if you dared to say that work should be about work and that it was wrong to constantly focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc in the workplace. The same is true over at Xerox.

Combined, workers basically learned to be yes-men. You follow the company line and do what you're told or you're gone. That type of insulated environment can scare the lesser management and engineers from challenging the guys at the top. Instead of someone saying "X is dumb, we really should look into Y," people would nod their heads and say "yes sir..." lest they lose their cushy job like thousands of their friends did.

Meanwhile, the brass drove the company into the ground, looking at short term profitability instead of long term stability and growth. They sold off the profitable divisions to keep the not-proftible ones alive. Eventually, the company had no really profitable divisions and combined with the collapse of film, their biggest worth is now in their patent portfolio. They're bleeding money badly and basically don't have anywhere to go. Of course, the brass keeps telling everyone that it'll be ok...

The city itself now owns Midtown Plaza, but they plan to give portions of the land away to companies in exchange for moving downtown (cannibalizing the suburbs). IIRC, one of the local mall developers had owned the property before that and was more than a million dollars behind in tax payments, but the city chose to pay them $10 million for the building. The local mall developers are also active in local government (though I don't remember if this particular one was).

The mayor prior to this one didn't actually live in Rochester, he lives in Batavia but owns property in Rochester. During the development of one of the sports stadiums built during his term, he directed the stadium to be built on property he owned even though it wasn't the best overall fit for the stadium.

For the most part, the local newspaper turned a blind eye to the behind the scenes shenanigans since they were very loud avocates of both projects. Not to mention the Fast Ferry, which lost $60 or $80 million over the course of 3 years. The paper also withheld publishing the fact that the city council had been told the ferry was going to fail and was a waste of money. Alas, the paper is VERY beholden to the government and its executives often serve on local community advocacy type panels, further clouding its supposed independence. The local tv and radio news personnel have been gutted over the last decade, so they don't really have the manpower to do much actual investigating themselves.

The city government is controlled by one party and the county government by another. There's a lot of animosity between the two which trickles right down to the residents. You know the typical stereotypes... the reality of the situation doesn't matter. On top of that, the city desperately wants to merge with the county, effectively taking over the county government, so the city can bleed the county to fill the coffers that have long been drained at further expense to the suburbs. The whole thing is a giant mess, partisanship reigns supreme and all that matters is the dogma, because nothing else gets published in this area and few on either side bother hear the other side's dogma.

You could argue that, since George Eastman's suicide, the city has suffered the exact same fate his corporation has... and for largely the same reasons. Complete and utter mismanagement based on a total misunderstanding of what is happening on the ground, no ability to realistically plan for the long term and the desire for the brass to aggrandize themselves in the short term.

A lot of this comes down to Albany and NYC just not caring. Downstate dominates the state legislature and you have to go back decades to find a Governor that isn't from the NYC-Albany-Hudson Corridor area. The state has all kinds of crazy mandates that have strangled upstate - the Medicaid burden in particular is strangling most upstate counties since NY is the only state to mandate every one of the federal governments optional Medicaid supplements AND then passes the costs on to the counties. Downstaters don't care because as long as things were good for Wall Street, things were good for NYC and as long as things were good for NYC, they were good for Albany.

In terms of the land, there's nowhere else I'd rather live... the Finger Lakes, Letchworth, a full four seasons, and the worst natural disasters tend to be snow or ice storms, which we're well equipped for. Politically and economically, the placve is a wasteland and the same solution - spend money on some grand government scheme like the Fast Ferry, Midtown or High Falls - is tried time and time again at great expense to the taxpayer. I mentioned Midtown below, for the outsiders that don't know, the taxpayers spent on the order of $80 million dollars to buy a building, tear it down and planned to give it to Paetec based on the premise that it would move a few hundred jobs a few miles from the suburbs downtown. We're blowing money to canabalize what is working here... oh, and the city never got a contract with Paetec, whom sold itself to Windstream this year anyway, and years later construction still hasn't started, so it was basically all for naught.

And that's just Rochester, look west to Erie County and the corruption is even more profound. Then we get into the hundreds (over 800 IIRC) governemnt "authorities" which are a way for the government to appoint friends to high paying political positions and waste more money off the state's books even though the government is ultimately responsible for them. All of it has caused business to flee... manufacturing used to dominate urban western NY, along with agriculture in the rural areas, and most of it has left, many for better states, not even foreign countries. Rochester's biggest employer now is the University of Rochester and while businesses flee, we seem to grow non-profit special interest organizations and healthcare jobs (just not specialists since they can make better money elsewhere) like there's no tomorrow.

And there's one other thing that keeps people here that should, under any rules of sanity, leave... their familes. That, ultimately, is why I've stayed. Lots of people, especially single people and/or young adults don't really care about moving away from their family, in fact, many of them relish it. But once you end up planting roots, it's hard to move away from the people that support you and that you support. The best thing that can happen is just admit that Upstate and Downstate have nothing in common, splitting the state into two states so that Upstate can operate free from the Downstate mandates and Downstate can stop whining about sending their tax money Upstate (yeah, lots of Upstaters think we send our money there, but the truth is it flows into here, just not at a high enough level to support the Downstate mandates).

Kodak's decline obviously had an effect on Rochester, but the total ineptness of government combined with the people's failure to hold the government responsible had more to do with the fall of the city. Crazy spending, high taxes, race problems causing white flight starting in the 60s, anti-business regulations like the NET offices, one party government, an unaccountable school system, a police system that was so bad that Rochester because the murder capital of NY and required the State Troopers to work with local police to get minor crimes under control, etc.

Business, not just Kodak, has fled Rochester and skilled workers need to follow the businesses to get jobs. Meanwhile, thanks to NY's lax and generous welfare policies, people are coming in to suck off the government's teat. The state itself is tone deaf since all that matters to the state is Albany and NYC. Of course, the fact that the incompetent police chief turned mayor that caused half the problems above got promoted to Lt Governor means that we'll chuck some more money on wasteful projects like his grand idea to buy and tear Midtown down to the tune of tens of mllions at taxpayer expense, only to turn it around to a business that never actually signed a contract to develop the land in the way he announced. Oh, and the property was in tax arrears and could have been foreclosed on, but why bother when he's not spending his own money to buy it?

Kodak, while painful, has been the least of Rochester's problems... and today, it's almost irrelevant, save for the outdated, often abandoned, infrastructure they've left all over the city.

Teddy Kennedy called from 1973... he used the same reasoning to create the HMO system. You know the insurance system which was basically run through government oversight - ranging from the price insurers could charge on premiums to what services they had to provide. It was supposed to be the solution to Medicare and Medicaid screwing up the insurance of the working class, which in turn were the solution to insurance screwing over the elderly and poor since workers got their health care covered and they didn't, which was the solution to the government, through the National Recovery Act during the Great Depression, telling businesses that they had to pay their workers a fixed government rate.

Every time the US government has stepped in, it made the situation worse... so what was the solution to our current health care problems? More government. What could possibly go wrong?

Besides, the entire purpose of the ACA/Obamacare is to collapse the insurance industry so that the government can come in and rescue us with socialized medicine. Because, hey, the governments of the US run like a well oiled machine, so it'll clearly be better than everything else and to top it off, everyone will get every bit of the care they ever need without having to pay anything!!! woohoo! It's not like we're already broke. What's another new entitlement? pfft!

Uh, Waco happened 2/28/1993 through 4/19/1993, while Ann Richards was Governor of Texas. Bush didn't become governor until 1/17/1995. Don't let reality get in the way of your "facts."

I don't have kids myself, but I am friends with a couple people that serve on my school's Board of Education. The #1 complaint I constantly hear from them is that the mandates imposed by the federal and the state governments tie their hands when it comes to really having much of any influence over what actually happens at the local level. Other than picking a Superintendent of Schools and negotiating contracts, about all they have control over is building maintenance schedules.

Maybe other states aren't as bad as NY is... but it seems like the "local" is mostly gone from the education system here. Getting involved in your kid's education is vital, but the PTA or BoE route may be meaningless.

and a fifth:

The federal government is willing to subsidize your education with grants and low interest loans. Knowing that you have this money out there and knowing just how little most people care how that money gets spent since it's "free money", colleges charge as much as they can to get all of that guaranteed money that they can. They don't care so much if you pass, fail or even enroll if costs get too high for you, because there's another person in line applying with that government money to spend too.

Of course, it all ties back into demand. People want to go to college because if they don't, it's hard to get a job. Most people don't care about expanding their knowledge or their ability to learn, they just want to be able to earn more than what McDonald's pays. And why do you need a degree to get a job outside of the professions where the knowledge is clearly needed before you can learn on the job? Well, because the boomers got sent to college because their WWII generation parents wanted something better for them. They're in charge now and since they got a degree, they think everyone should get a degree, if only to validate what they did themselves.

The whole system is a waste for most people, for most of society, from actually getting a degree they don't care about and don't really need, to blowing billions of dollars of tax money a year encouraging them to do so. Chapter 4 of Thomas Sowell's "Economic Facts and Fallacies" explains it all in far greater detail.

There was a large complacent middle class from the very beginning of America... Only about a third of the country, led largely by the upper class, whom had the most to gain but also the most to lose, wanted to revolt against England. Another third, again, largely led by the upper class that were scared to lose, wanted to continue our relationship with England. The final third didn't really care, they just wanted to be left alone to do their thing.

Anyway, at the time, we had the very wealthy - large plantation owners, the very poor - slaves, indentured servants and the like, and a large middle class made up of independent businessmen and the help they hired. That held true up until the 20th century, when the government decided that it needed to become involved in the business of redistributing the wealth as a reaction to the extreme wealth created by the industrial revolution, largely due to a fad regarding Marx, Engels and such.

The post-WWII boom wasn't created by the policies of Wilson, FDR, LBJ or whatever progressive hero you have, it was created by the simple fact that most of the factories in the rest of the industrial world were destroyed by war and Europe, Eastern Asia and the like had to rely on the unscathed factories of the United States and Canada to rebuild. It was only natural that, as the manufacturing capacity of Europe and Asia were rebuilt, that the United States would decline. You've been trained to blaim the policies of Nixon, but it was simply the duration of the rebound of the first world economy outside of the Americas.

What we had done in the meantime, was create numerous entitlement programs which, especially regarding the Great Society, were unsustainable. Specifically in the case of the Great Society, with welfare, Medicaid, Medicare and the like, Congress decided to raid the Social Security Trust Fund (via an Amendment in 1967) to paper over the huge costs, which had far exceeded CBO projections prior to passage. The truth is, in addition to taxes, inflation, and bonds, Congress was raiding the other "lock boxed" source of income, largely so they could continue to lie to people, telling us that we could afford something they already knew would bankrupt us. They lied and they were either retired or dead before people began to catch on - but they got to stay in office longer, having duped the masses.

So, by all means, blame Nixon. Blame Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush if you want to... but be sure to blame Obama, Clinton, Carter, LBJ, JFK, Eisenhower, Truman, FDR, Hoover, Wilson and TR too, since they all contributed to our current problems in their own way. Don't be a partisan hack and pretend all the problems fall on one side or even one President, because they were all involved. More importantly, don't forget their Congresses, since the President can't introduce legislation on their own and all spending, in particular, must originate in the House.

Be sure to blame the unions too... for demanding more than what was responsible in the long term, but like the 1967 Congress that authorized raiding the Social Security Trust Fund, blame the union leadership for cashing in on what they knew was unsustainable so they could maintain and grow their own power, influence and pocketbooks. Likewise, blame the executives that capitulated to them.

Under the guise of redistribution of wealth, you end up with two classes - the rich that have the money to defend themselves, and the poor, who demand everything from anyone else. It's the middle class, which has enough money to provide for themselves but not enough money to defend themselves, that suffer from the powers that demanding wealth redistribution, be it the government or the special interest groups that advocate it. It's also the natural result of converting the government from a body solely meant to protect our rights into a body out to seek reparations from one group on behalf of another.

It wasn't the Tea Party people that bit off someone's finger at a town hall. How about the SEIU beating up a black conservative in St Louis at a town hall meeting?

Do you have any actual examples of these "retired tea baggers with drugged, crazy eyes" commiting violence or are you just regurgitating rhetoric the way you happen to remember it?

Remember Alan Grayson talking about how the GOP plan is for everyone to die quickly? Or shots being fired at Eric Cantor's office?

Speaking of Medicare, the Democrats cut it by a half trillion dollars to fund ObamaCare, but when the Republicans came out with a reform package this summer, what did the Democrats do? ran an ad about how Republicans want to literally push grandma over a cliff."

So yeah, it's those Republicans pushing their scare tactics on their constituents, commiting acts of terror. Actual violence committed by Democrats? eh, that's not terror under the same definition because, well, they're on your side.

Wasn't it Obama that said having to raise the debt ceiling was a "leadership failure" when he voted against it in 2006? Do you hold him to the same standards as you do Republicans, or is this another one of those my team good, your team bad things?

And the crisis WAS manufactured... by Obama. The US has enough revenue that it won't default on it's debts if the limit wasn't raised. We have enough revenue to fund all of the most critical portions of the federal government too. It was a scare tactic to get people to panic so Obama wouldn't have to think about fulfilling his campaign promise to actually cut back the waste in the federal government.

Nice to know that everyone that you don't agree with politically is a terrorist while you ignore the actual violence and threats perpetrated by your team. You do realize that you just repeated GWB's "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric, right?

Actually, that's what the Founding Fathers wanted... they wanted local governments to provide the services local constituents wanted. They realized that the federal government was too large and distant to be able to provide for the nuanced needs of local communities, so they deliberately forbid the federal government's involvement, leaving those powers to the states and people.

Communities need to decide the needs of their respective community, if the federal government tries to do it for them, we end up with crap like NCLB or the (federal) Department of Education allocating grants for schools to buy computers even if they just bought new computers and need new books instead.

Not all fire trucks are red. My town has red, a neighboring town's are yellow. I've also seen white nearby and powder blue ones when I was traveling elsewhere in the country.

Regardless, there were numerous reasons why red was chosen by many fire companies (visibility, pride/using it as a show piece during parades, etc), not just the communist diatribe about how red ended up the chosen color.

What he means, is if you disagree with Obama's policies, as the Tea Party movement generally does, it must be because of Obama's race. After all, that's what the echo chamber says...

The sad part, is that the race card has officially been played out.. so when someone legitimately calls "racist" in the future, most people will just roll their eyes. Much like you'll see lefties mockingly call each other "communist" or "socialist" on slashdot when someone posts something pro-goernment, righties mockingly call each other "racist" whenever someone opposes some government policy.

The AC you replied to is just another mindless lemming that most likely pats himself on the back, thinking he's doing some great deed for society, when, in reality, he's just a troll.