{"id":72,"date":"2006-01-23T09:26:57","date_gmt":"2006-01-23T14:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=72"},"modified":"2019-12-26T15:00:57","modified_gmt":"2019-12-26T20:00:57","slug":"watching-the-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/watching-the-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Watching the numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Meanwhile, over at The Political Notebook, Michael Caputo gives a nice overview of Monroe County&#8217;s budget situation. He offers some background on how local officials have used tobacco settlement money, weaving in an addiction analogy. Among the tidbits: county leaders have been selling bonds against future tobacco money for pennies on the dollar. This brings to mind hapless lottery winners who don&#8217;t have the wherewithall to manage their financial windfalls, and thereby fall prey to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=sell+lottery+winnings&amp;hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;ie=ISO-8859-1\">the post-jackpot vultures<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But probably more important is this eensy weensy fact: this is our money. We, the taxpayers.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s another analogy. Suppose you needed some cash, and quickly. Someone found out, and offered to refinance your home, only instead of giving you the face value of whatever equity you&#8217;ve accumulated, they offered you 10 cents on the dollar.<\/p>\n<p>Would you take it?<\/p>\n<p>The funny thing about finances is that the more you need money, the harder it is to do deals from a position of strength. But unless you assume a position of strength, you&#8217;ll never halt the downward spiral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Meanwhile, over at The Political Notebook, Michael Caputo gives a nice overview of Monroe County&#8217;s budget situation. He offers some background on how local officials have used tobacco settlement money, weaving in an addiction analogy. Among the tidbits: county leaders &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/watching-the-numbers\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[67,66,513],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rochester-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-rochester","tag-tobacco-settlement"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4980,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/4980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}