City told to gird for more budget cuts -- baltimoresun.com

City told to gird for more budget cuts -- baltimoresun.com: "Baltimore must carve $130 million from its already stripped-down spending plan to account for plummeting revenue and mushrooming pension costs next year, according to projections released Tuesday afternoon.

The grim figures indicate the city, still reeling from sweeping cuts earlier this year, must dig even deeper to balance next year's budget."

Baltimore City faces a big budget problem. Many businesses have shut down. People have been moving away for years. The declining housing market has made things much worse. The proposed response from some in city government - let's tax non-profits. No one in City Hall has seriously proposed ending the war on drugs as an appropriate first step. I often spent hours as a prosecutor sitting around in court dealing with petty drug offenses. I got paid well to do work that I considered to be fairly worthless. We would often plea out drug cases for time served, often without probation. Many times distribution cases would be knocked down and charged as 'attempted distribution' so they would be treated as misdemeanors. Officers often got paid overtime to make these arrests and got overtime again to show up to court. It was the biggest waste of time, energy, and money that I have ever seen.