Did you step on your crank tonight that it upset you so bad that someone
was ripping on Kentucky or Louisville for that matter. MAYBE THEY Don't
live in Louisville or got smart and moved the hell out of Louisville.
It upsets you whiners so much that you think you've automatically
became a tough guy and got a little testosterone in your system that it
would make you more of a man.
Unlike you, I don't live in Mom or Dad's basement and been out on my own
since age 18. That's over 20 years of being a man to you little boy.
Don't like my opinion, fine. But Louisville Kentucky is the biggest
white trash infested hole that I have ever seen and I've visited 40 plus
states, half of Canada and been out of this country a lot. Louisville
isn't as bad as say Detroit or Chitcago but Louisville is a white trash
infested cesspool as is most of Kentucky. The only problem with goobers
like yourself is that you have nothing better to compare it with where
some of us do.
Louisville might as well be referred to as a Third World city in a Third
World city in the United States. Why do I mention this because I've
been all over and outside of some inner city ghetto area in one of these
big metro areas, Louisville Kentucky might as well be one of them but
with a lot more white people than your average large city has. It might
be understandable if Louisville was like Memphis and was 50 percent
black or if it was like New Orleans and 60 percent black. Or even like
the city of Chicago which is about 1/3 white, 1/3 black and 1/3
Hispanic.
But instead Louisville is a city that is almost 80 percent white these
days and that includes all of Jefferson County. Hell, the Metro area
surrounding Louisville has about 1.2 million people and is 85 percent
white. Yet, its the biggest dump for a white controlled area that I've
ever seen in my life. You clowns bitch about the West End and everyone
for 100 miles knows that the West End is a dung pile yet its only one
part of the city that is mostly black.
Hell, even your neighborhoods in South Louisville, Germantown, PRP,
Valley, Fairdale, Hillview, Okolona and other areas are total white
trash hellholes.
Take a look at what kind of trash and crap that you have in your
neighborhoods. That can't just be a few black people that moved in
causing the problems. When I lived there it was mostly white trash
losers or people that were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who were a bunch
of losers whose only job prospect was being a toilet plunger at
McDonalds. That's why low wage box flipping and distribution companies
move to Louisville because they know they have a large base of stupid
and uneducated clowns incapable of doing anything more than working
service jobs or maybe peeling a label off a box and putting it on
another one and sending it down a conveyor line.
Here's another clue. Your schools produce generations of imbeciles hat
are incapable of doing the most basic and rudimentary procedures. People
that cannot even spell a persons name correctly after being told their
name and spelled out too. Or people that spend half the day on the local
TV media Facebook page and half of them don't make a bit of sense. Then
I also find out in Louisville when I lived there in 2006 to 2013 that
the schools are so bad that in the state of Kentucky they rank regularly
in the bottom 25 percent of all school districts. This in the state
that ranks anywhere from 42nd to 47th in the US in education. That's
right, the JCPS sucks so badly at providing a decent education to the
people of Louisville and their kids that it ranks 126th out of 154
Kentucky school systems. Yikes! That's about the 20th percentile or so
or at least the bottom 1/4 of all schools.
Even more laughable is that you have people in positions of management
and things that require real skills that have problems spelling. That
says a lot for the blind leading the blind. Hell, when I lived in
Louisville and applied for a job, I was told by the generational moron
in charge of this one company that my resume had all kinds of mistakes.
That's damn funny because I also spell checked it and also proofread it
before giving it to the moron. This wasn't some temp service job or some
clown job cleaning tables at the neighborhood fast food place. This was
supposedly a professional place of employment where you would think
that the manager would actually understand basic principles of the
English language.
I've heard assholes from Louisville constantly talk as if their city is
the shit or a top notch community. Nothing is further from the truth and
its a laughingstock and has been for years. Even outfits like the
Brookings Institution know that Louisville ranks low on the score when
in comparison to other US cities similar sized. Places like Charlotte,
Indianapolis, Kansas City, etc.
Louisville outside of the far East End these days is a crime infested
dump and everyone within 75 miles of Louisville already knows that. Not
just property crimes or drug crimes that happen everywhere but also all
kinds of bullshit going on. Before you make a comment about my
experiences in Louisville, by the way, I lived there several years and
for a city the size of Louisville, its a complete joke. So I packed my
family up happily moved 100 miles away and laugh at what a joke
Louisville is these days. I've even had offers by businesses for me to
move back there for jobs and I laugh at them because let's face it, your
community sucks.
What kind of moronic idiot goes into a bar in Louisville and talks to a
bunch of drunk jackasses that half the time are so mentally fucked up
that they can barely piss in a toilet. Ever fought a drunk, its easy to
knock the shit out of a drunk because they are so unstable that unless
they hit you with a bottle it would take nothing to beat the hell out of
them. Plus, who in the hell is going to listen to a bunch of drunks
that want to start shit and are already wasted just after 5 pm.
Kentucky is easily picked apart because like most of the Southern states
with the exception of one or two of them, it is the asshole of the
nation. Its the asshole of the nation in so many categories that its
almost funny if it was not so tragic. Like education for example.
Kentucky has other states like Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, even Missouri to
look up being northern states that are higher on the education totem
pole. Yet, Kentuckians want to act like a bunch of backwoods jackasses
from West Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Consistently in the
bottom 10 states in just about everything from income to education to
percentage of morbidly obese people with health issues.
I can assure you this much, moving out of Kentucky was the best thing
for me and my family and our incomes and sanity intact instead of
dealing with backwoods morons on a daily basis. Everywhere has some
moronic individuals but in Kentucky they breed them like rats in a
plague. We will continue our quest to improve our livelihoods and
standard of education. Shame that Kentucky fails at miserably not just
in forums like Craigslist but also in real life. Which is where it
counts when your state is one of the bottom 5 to 10 states in every
category.
One would think that you toothless hillbillies down in Louisville could
at least aspire to something other than being a bunch of inbred
jackasses incapable of rational thought. I'll keep the reason and
rational though and you can keep the Mountain Dew rotted teeth and the
blatant stupidity and we'll see who has a better quality of life
Monday, February 24, 2020
Louisville Style Social Promotion
Louisville is like a skidmark on the underpants of humanity. It’s like a big brown stain from a bathroom accident that ruined a new pair of tighty whities. The culture is a fake friendly culture rampant with fake Southern hospitality that you might find elsewhere than Louisville. As someone that lived in Louisville during the mid 2000s through the 2007 to 2012 recession and finally got out in 2013 I was never so glad to leave that area.
Where I am at now in Indiana may not be heaven but its still better than a state that ranks 47th in just about everything like Kentucky. Kentucky ranks 47th in personal income, 47th in median income, 47th in household income, 47th in educational attainment, 43rd in quality of its colleges, 41st in K to 12 grade education, worst ran state by Governing magazine, 3rd worst public pension system etc. Furthermore, it’s worst for retirees out of any state, worst in overall health outcomes, most depressed state, etc.
That’s not counting the butthole that consists of Louisville/Loo A Vull/Lou Billy/Loo A Bull and whatever they call that stinking shithole on the Ohio River. I’ve been to most of the cities in the eastern 2/3 of the country and Louisville aka Loubilly is for the most a total wretched place. Not only that but the educational level and lack of common sense is annoying, people don’t have basic social graces, don’t understand common courtesy, don’t understand how to drive by any means and are generally loutish, uneducated, white trashy along with a so called cultural superiority bar none.
Despite all this genteel superiority that covers the ugliness like a salve covering a severe case of gangrene it isn’t really anything to write home about. The schools are horrendous and most of the people act as if they’ve never brought a book home during school much less actually read anything. Education is lacking to the point that high school graduates and those of several generations out of school lack basic knowledge of how the world works. The economy in Louisville is built around low wage box flipping jobs packing and picking and scratching one’s rear end. With the exception of a couple of automotive plants and some affiliated industries making parts and accessories and other equipment for cars and trucks, etc there isn’t much of a base any longer.
Louisville ranks high in having a serious douchey feel to the city from having tons of grown men with hipster clothes working at jobs that are beneath them but then disdaining the education to do better. Its like if you are a professional and want to do something with your career, in Louisville they will want you to take a menial shit scraping job when you’ve had better paying employment with more skills and responsibilities. Especially after you’ve had 15 or 20 years in the workforce that they’re too stupid in Louisville to realize that you’re too knowledgeable and skilled to be scraping shit off someones shoe or working at some low wage, low skill occupation. No thank you. Or better yet, feel free to stick your no skill, no talent, monkey feces throwing job up your ass with a steel beam attached to it hold a flashlight/spotlight.
Louisville culture revolves around 3 things those being U of L basketball or Kentucky basketball along with getting piss wasted drunk on the swill that they call bourbon and think its the end all be all of the world. The third thing is a hypocritical brand of religion where a lot of the church congregants sit on their hands and talk on Sunday about being a better person then for the rest of the week stabbing their fellow man in the rear end. All the while preaching all of their virtues that none of them practice themselves. Add in a healthy dose of narcissism along with lack of common sense and education and it shows you that Kentucky is a place mostly of self aggrandizing morons with barely the 80 IQ that most of the state residents have. Meanwhile they all think they are corporate CEO material even though they don’t have the education, skills, knowledge or anything else to run a real company in most cases.
That is why the job climate is shitty in Louisville as well because the schools largely work on social promotion where you have 10th to 12th graders at a clip of 40 percent proficient at doing mathematics and 36 percent proficient or excelling at science. Even in English composition, reading, writing and vocabulary they only average about 52 percent being proficient at 12th grade English. Which is why they have to take remedial classes at one of the 43rd state ranking colleges that they have in Kentucky. In fact, institutions like U of L which isn’t even a top 100 US university despite having the largest financial endowments in the country. In fact, U of L ranks about 170th out the country and the hick infested U of K in Lexington is not much better about 130th.
Jefferson County is like three mentally ill relatives all shouting at each other when you consider parts of Louisville. You have the West End which is primarily minority majority along with the South End which is mostly bubba types that barely graduated high school or flunked out and got their GED. Then you have the East End which is mostly a bunch of overpaid and overcompensated people with decent education but practically know much of nothing outside of their own section of the city. The people from the East look down on the West and South and the rest of Kentucky even though they are city cousins with the rest of the Appalachian and downstate folks.
The only real differences between Louisville and say the rest of the state involves being one of two very large cities in Kentucky. The rest of it is just about the same the only other differences is that people generally have nice houses and nicer vehicles. Even though most of them behave like Bubba and Bubbette in suits and dresses at their employment. Its like someone took a Bubba clone from the backwoods and hills of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia and put them in a suit and tie and told them to act intelligent but they don’t have the foundational base to be moderately intelligent.
Another thing about Louisville/LouBilly is that it is one of the most politically corrupt places around with mismanaged local government, poor level of services for the taxes you do pay and also running pretty much on broke both with the Metro Sewer District being in the hole 4 billion dollars and needing billions more to fix the floodgates, walls and pumps that keeps the city from being another New Orleans during floods. Then to have a chicken bucket arena that costs 1 billion dollars plus in principal and interest from 2010 to 2054 when it will finally be paid off and not have a professional team there but only women’s and men's basketball and a few concerts here and there is insane.
The local business community is a joke including the things like Greater Louisville Inc, Young Professionals of Louisville YPAL and pretty much most other civic organizations. Their idea of economic progress is creating all kinds of 10 dollar an hour jobs for people with bachelor’s degrees and other skills as well as furthering their education with Master’s or Doctorate’s. Half the people in the Louisville business community have problems even spelling basic words and when I lived there they couldn’t spell words that were on my resume and trying to correct my spelling even after I proofread and spell checked it a couple of times.
That’s the type of idiots that exist in Louisville which is why generations of people have left Louisville especially those with any level of talent and didn’t buy into the whole white trash mystique of the area.
Where I am at now in Indiana may not be heaven but its still better than a state that ranks 47th in just about everything like Kentucky. Kentucky ranks 47th in personal income, 47th in median income, 47th in household income, 47th in educational attainment, 43rd in quality of its colleges, 41st in K to 12 grade education, worst ran state by Governing magazine, 3rd worst public pension system etc. Furthermore, it’s worst for retirees out of any state, worst in overall health outcomes, most depressed state, etc.
That’s not counting the butthole that consists of Louisville/Loo A Vull/Lou Billy/Loo A Bull and whatever they call that stinking shithole on the Ohio River. I’ve been to most of the cities in the eastern 2/3 of the country and Louisville aka Loubilly is for the most a total wretched place. Not only that but the educational level and lack of common sense is annoying, people don’t have basic social graces, don’t understand common courtesy, don’t understand how to drive by any means and are generally loutish, uneducated, white trashy along with a so called cultural superiority bar none.
Despite all this genteel superiority that covers the ugliness like a salve covering a severe case of gangrene it isn’t really anything to write home about. The schools are horrendous and most of the people act as if they’ve never brought a book home during school much less actually read anything. Education is lacking to the point that high school graduates and those of several generations out of school lack basic knowledge of how the world works. The economy in Louisville is built around low wage box flipping jobs packing and picking and scratching one’s rear end. With the exception of a couple of automotive plants and some affiliated industries making parts and accessories and other equipment for cars and trucks, etc there isn’t much of a base any longer.
Louisville ranks high in having a serious douchey feel to the city from having tons of grown men with hipster clothes working at jobs that are beneath them but then disdaining the education to do better. Its like if you are a professional and want to do something with your career, in Louisville they will want you to take a menial shit scraping job when you’ve had better paying employment with more skills and responsibilities. Especially after you’ve had 15 or 20 years in the workforce that they’re too stupid in Louisville to realize that you’re too knowledgeable and skilled to be scraping shit off someones shoe or working at some low wage, low skill occupation. No thank you. Or better yet, feel free to stick your no skill, no talent, monkey feces throwing job up your ass with a steel beam attached to it hold a flashlight/spotlight.
Louisville culture revolves around 3 things those being U of L basketball or Kentucky basketball along with getting piss wasted drunk on the swill that they call bourbon and think its the end all be all of the world. The third thing is a hypocritical brand of religion where a lot of the church congregants sit on their hands and talk on Sunday about being a better person then for the rest of the week stabbing their fellow man in the rear end. All the while preaching all of their virtues that none of them practice themselves. Add in a healthy dose of narcissism along with lack of common sense and education and it shows you that Kentucky is a place mostly of self aggrandizing morons with barely the 80 IQ that most of the state residents have. Meanwhile they all think they are corporate CEO material even though they don’t have the education, skills, knowledge or anything else to run a real company in most cases.
That is why the job climate is shitty in Louisville as well because the schools largely work on social promotion where you have 10th to 12th graders at a clip of 40 percent proficient at doing mathematics and 36 percent proficient or excelling at science. Even in English composition, reading, writing and vocabulary they only average about 52 percent being proficient at 12th grade English. Which is why they have to take remedial classes at one of the 43rd state ranking colleges that they have in Kentucky. In fact, institutions like U of L which isn’t even a top 100 US university despite having the largest financial endowments in the country. In fact, U of L ranks about 170th out the country and the hick infested U of K in Lexington is not much better about 130th.
Jefferson County is like three mentally ill relatives all shouting at each other when you consider parts of Louisville. You have the West End which is primarily minority majority along with the South End which is mostly bubba types that barely graduated high school or flunked out and got their GED. Then you have the East End which is mostly a bunch of overpaid and overcompensated people with decent education but practically know much of nothing outside of their own section of the city. The people from the East look down on the West and South and the rest of Kentucky even though they are city cousins with the rest of the Appalachian and downstate folks.
The only real differences between Louisville and say the rest of the state involves being one of two very large cities in Kentucky. The rest of it is just about the same the only other differences is that people generally have nice houses and nicer vehicles. Even though most of them behave like Bubba and Bubbette in suits and dresses at their employment. Its like someone took a Bubba clone from the backwoods and hills of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia and put them in a suit and tie and told them to act intelligent but they don’t have the foundational base to be moderately intelligent.
Another thing about Louisville/LouBilly is that it is one of the most politically corrupt places around with mismanaged local government, poor level of services for the taxes you do pay and also running pretty much on broke both with the Metro Sewer District being in the hole 4 billion dollars and needing billions more to fix the floodgates, walls and pumps that keeps the city from being another New Orleans during floods. Then to have a chicken bucket arena that costs 1 billion dollars plus in principal and interest from 2010 to 2054 when it will finally be paid off and not have a professional team there but only women’s and men's basketball and a few concerts here and there is insane.
The local business community is a joke including the things like Greater Louisville Inc, Young Professionals of Louisville YPAL and pretty much most other civic organizations. Their idea of economic progress is creating all kinds of 10 dollar an hour jobs for people with bachelor’s degrees and other skills as well as furthering their education with Master’s or Doctorate’s. Half the people in the Louisville business community have problems even spelling basic words and when I lived there they couldn’t spell words that were on my resume and trying to correct my spelling even after I proofread and spell checked it a couple of times.
That’s the type of idiots that exist in Louisville which is why generations of people have left Louisville especially those with any level of talent and didn’t buy into the whole white trash mystique of the area.
Kentucky Welfare Society And It's Love Hate Relationship With Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul
The reason why Mitch McConnell continues to serve himself rather than Kentuckians is that he’s actually got them snowed and fooled about what he is really about. He plays the conservative angle which makes him popular in the Commonwealth of Kentucky with about half of the people. The rest of them end up getting bought off because Kentucky largely lives off of largesse from the federal government. Kentuckians don’t realize that their state even though its 47th in the nation in just about every major category would be even worse off without welfare programs.
Mitch McConnell delivers the pork barrel spending and government largesse that keeps Kentucky economically somewhat afloat even though it ranks 47th in personal income, 47th in family income, 47th in median household income, worst ran state by Governing Magazine, worst place to retire, worst state for elders, worst state for child abuse, worst state for health outcomes, 41st in K-12 education, 43rd in universities and 47th in educational achievement.
What Mitch McConnell and Kentucky politicians over the years have been good at going back to Senator John Sherman Cooper, Wendell Ford, etc is getting the welfare bacon for Kentucky in the form of federal aid which props up the derelict Kentucky economy. We’re talking about food stamps, government handouts, farm subsidies, military spending at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell, various other government programs that benefit Kentucky because the state is so broke economically that it pretty much go under without vast federal spending.
The truth about Kentucky is that in many ways its an economic basketcase despite having relatively higher state taxes and cities like Louisville that have very high taxes. Kentucky is so broke that it can’t properly fund its educators pension system along with all the rest of its public employees. Think it about this way, Mitch throws the red meat to his base in so called conservatism yet he can buy votes because Kentucky gets $1.51 for $1 in federal taxes unlike states in the more liberal areas of the country like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, Washington, Massachusetts.
What happens in those states is that they are taxed at their higher income levels in a way that it goes to the federal government and they are paying much more in taxes than what they receive in government handouts. So in essence the economic creators in those liberal states are funding Kentucky government and Kentucky society since they are paying $1 dollar in federal taxes yet only getting 65 or 70 cents of it back in government expenditures in their states. Plus they have a much higher income level of averaging much higher salaries so they end up paying very high tax amounts to the federal government which ends up benefiting Kentucky and its economically backwards state.
Not to mention a high percentage of Kentuckians are on Medicaid and Medicare and the state doesn’t have the funding to pay for all of that spending without the Feds giving them huge handouts. The same could be said for federal programs like HUD, Section 8, Rural Development, SNAP, etc. If the Feds cut that out then Kentucky would probably be if not the poorest state maybe 2nd poorest after Mississippi. Just like how Kentucky gets huge grants in money from the Feds every time there is some sort of calamity or the state government bungles its finances.
Kentucky has a road and infrastructure ranked as a “D” level by the American Society of Civil Engineers and billions would have to be spent to get the system up to just being average along the fact that Kentucky has been mismanaged for so long that the system is teetering and would collapse without vast amounts of welfare and federal aid. 900,000 Kentucky residents out of 4.5 million Kentuckians are also functionally illiterate which hinders them in being able to live, hold jobs, keep quality jobs and improve their education, training and livelihoods. So effectively about 20 percent of the people in Kentucky are functionally illiterate and can only do the very minimum which leads to poverty and less quality jobs.
So Kentucky gets the red meat from McConnell for the conservatives while he plays the other side of getting the most pork barrel welfare projects out of many of the states right there in Kentucky. I lived in Kentucky and its easier to qualify for some sort of disability or mental issue there than just about anywhere else because they have hundreds of thousands of Kentucky residents who get welfare assistance and government handouts. It’s easier to get a disability determination for being mentally disabled in Kentucky because a long known statute in Kentucky law allows for the state to pay for incompetents and known idiots and allows them the right to obtain a government check for such. This law has been in effect for the better part of 200 plus years in Kentucky.
This law was crafted early in Kentucky statehood in the late 1700s if not early 1800s I cannot recall the exact date but it allowed for a pauper idiot law where people considered to be stupid would be given an awarded check from the state for being morons going back to about 1792. This is why partially it is easier in Kentucky to get taken care of by the state by claiming mental status illnesses and being a moron.
That is the link to the whole story about that law that was printed some 80 years ago by University of Chicago Press.
So McConnell if though he is not well liked by many Kentuckians has a definite advantage of consolidating the Republican and conservative base as well as bringing home the bacon which is why he keeps getting re-elected by the fools of Kentucky. Furthermore, when a state is 47th in educational attainment they aren’t always going to be voting in their best interests.
Don't Move To Louisville...Much Less Most of Kentucky
Don't move to Louisville! I mean it seriously that if you're from elsewhere in the rest of the country and you've lived somewhere isn't a huge ghetto or urban slum you'll be sadly disappointed at best and downright negative to melancholy at worst. It's not that great of a city and its seriously backwards and lives in a state of delusion with delusional thinking which might as well give it the name of Delusionalville.
I lived there for the better part of several years and if you’re thinking about moving there by all means don’t because its actually a very regressive city and area. They like to pronounce it as being someplace you’ll just love but overall unless you’re an upper middle class American family making 80,000 or above a year its really not all that special. Most people that live there are there because they were native born Louisville residents and or from Kentucky. If you want to live in a middle sized to larger city there are several options which are much better than Louisville and that’s most anywhere in the Eastern Us within a few hundred miles from Louisville.
Nashville, TN is much more economically and job wise progressive than Louisville and same could be said for Indianapolis, Columbus, Charlotte, Nashville, Kansas City, St. Louis Metro (not city), etc. That’s just the smaller cities of the region not including Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta, etc. If you’ve got any real talent and abilities you can score a good job somewhere else and don’t waste your time on a declining city such as Louisville. Not to mention Louisville which might as well be called LouBilly because of the high percentage of hilljacks, bubbas and rednecks isn’t really anything to brag about. It’s main claims to fame are Muhammad Ali, the Kentucky Derby, bourbon and basketball.
If it wasn’t for those four things you would be looking at a city with not much more to offer than say Chattanooga which is 1/4 the size of Louisville. Nothing to against Chattanooga or Knoxville or other smaller cities but Louisville likes to puff up its chest real big about what a great city and urban area that it is yet its economically and educationally backward that is considered progressive while being in one of the worst states in the United States. Worst states for college educated people, worst states for K-12 education, 47th in just about everything out of the 50 states including personal income, family income, median income, educational achievement. Not to mention the worst state for retirees, children, minorities right down there at the bottom of most of the southern states.
Louisville is actually close enough to the Northern tier of states that it should be much more progressive economically, socially and overall quality of society things such as education, the arts, museums, cultural events. However, its like a big cow town based on the Ohio River where nothing really changes economically or improves because its been ran by the same type of small minded hilljacks even in the City/Metro Council and mayors that are basically mayors of a large Mayberry. That’s why businesses don’t largely come to Louisville because of the crummy schools in Kentucky as well as the lack of educated people along with being the 4th highest taxed city for local taxes in the country. Add in a fair amount of hidden racism and bigotry and low class culture and education and that is what you have in Kentucky and even in a so called progressive city like Louisville.
Louisville often gets compared to Portland, OR but its a laughable comparison for anyone who has actually been to both of those cities as well as anywhere else that has a similar type of lifestyle. Its not progressive at all whether that’s the crummy local economy, homeless people everywhere because their increasingly crummy jobs don’t pay decent wages, temp services galore, low wage employers that dominate Louisville especially low wage service industry jobs that don’t pay much above minimum wage when an apartment costs 700 to 1000 a month. Yeah, it looks cheap compared to Nashville or Chicago or Boston or NYC or the West Coast. Yet, you’ll find out that the local wage structure is about 25 percent below the national average in Kentucky without the resulting cost of living savings that you would get for being in a smaller city.
You can do better than Louisville…even if you’ve been a lifelong loser with limited educational/training prospects and abilities. It’s just not all its cracked up to be and I spent most of the last 15 years in that region so I know what it consists of probably better than most of the people that have lived in Louisville their entire lives. It’s that self absorbed and clueless in cultural advances that many of its residents and local yokels actually believe that Lou-A-Vull aka Louisville which sounds locally like Lou-A-Bull is actually someplace that is the end all and be all of society and culturally superior to anywhere else you could pick up and move to.
Despite the fact that much of the Louisville and Kentucky population but also over into Southern Indiana hasn’t really spent any real amount of their lives outside of the local region and in many cases has no real idea how the real world outside of Kentuckiana actually works.
Kentucky: Land Of Functional Illiterates and Deadbeats
Functional illiterates in the sense that Kentucky has about 20 percent of its population which is considered by its own state officials as functionally illiterate. People who are incapable of filling out a job application, performing basic tasks, having problems doing basic math, writing and understanding logic.
Sure we could say that its going to be coal or alcoholic beverages or automobile parts which you can find those statistics on what is Kentucky’s biggest export products. However, I would have to say that a lot of people end up leaving Kentucky and moving to other states and end up taxing our states social welfare programs. Especially social welfare programs that should be meant for people who are physically and severely mentally disabled and not for people that refused to get an education in school and learning basic tasks to get along in life.
That is the real problem with Kentucky is that a high percentage of Kentucky residents are on the government dole and have been for generations. They want to blame the state government which does truly suck but its more than that and it involves the local communities in Kentucky producing next to nothing economically except people that end up going to the government office to apply for either a welfare check or a social security check when they are physically able to obtain a job and even mentally able if they are not lazy to get an education and move elsewhere.
They’ve had 80 plus years as a bottom tier state in Kentucky to make up their minds and improve education and finding people that want to achieve rather than sitting around collecting a government stipend every month. Instead, the state does little to attract paying jobs to rural communities in many places in Eastern Kentucky but also many other rural areas. So instead in order to sustain some level of social stability, these people are encouraged by local leaders to go sign up for government benefits including Social Security Disability and SSI that they really shouldn’t be entitled to since they are not physically disabled or suffering from a real mental issue.
That is the problem with Kentucky and the true nature of much of Kentucky society that its easier there than just about anywhere to get social disability assistance even though a high percentage of these people could work or at least work part time to help pay taxes and pay for their own upkeep. There’s no excuse when you could be getting an education and stop making excuses for the reason why you can’t pick up some books and take classes to better yourselves including trade school or whatever else you have to do. The Social Security Disability needs to go to people who really have legitimate disabilities and real physical problems not people who want a free ride because they refuse to pick up some tools and earn an honest days living. I was 18 years old and 3 days out of school and had my first full time job and within 2 weeks of that I was working in the automotive industry while also attending college. There is no excuse and only if you are physically maimed or disabled and instead they help out deadbeats that refuse to work anywhere.
Kentucky and Louisville Are Not In The Midwest: They Are Southerners
It sits on the border of largely what is the Midwest and the South. People from Louisville area call it Kentuckiana since its part Kentucky and part Indiana. In my honest opinion, you don’t get to the true Midwest until you get about 1/3 of the way into Indiana or somewhere above Bloomington, Indiana and Columbus, Indiana. The same can be said for Ohio that you don’t really get into the Midwest until you get somewhere north of Cincinnati or closer to Columbus and then its definitely northern.
In Indiana, I notice a big difference in the cultural aspect of people whereas the Southern 1/3 of the state pretty much from US 50 on southward identify more with Kentucky than they do with the Indianapolis area or Northern Indiana. They might claim to be from Indiana but the truth is that a lot of their kinfolk came from the South and especially Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and that area of the US.
So in my view you only really get into the Midwest once you get about 50 miles or 75 miles north of the Kentucky border depending where you are Indiana or Ohio and then you lose the Southern cultural aspects of things in many cases.
For example, my nearest very large city is Indianapolis which has a great many streets with Northern names for states and some of the main thoroughfares are New York Street, Massachusetts Avenue and although they do have some north south streets like Georgia Street or Kentucky Ave a great many of the downtown streets take their names from places in the north rather than southern states.
Louisville is definitely in the South. You can tell by the accents and by the cultural leanings even though it yearns to be a Midwestern city like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, or St. Louis its simply never going to be Midwestern. That goes doubly with the mentality that I’ve seen in Kentucky and Louisville over the years. They just have a lot of Southern mannerisms and attitudes. For example, when it comes to race in many northern locations such racial comments would be seriously frowned up but in places like Louisville or other Kentucky cities they have a pre-1960s mentality when it comes to civil rights and equality under the law.
That’s one of many issues that I think keeps Louisville into being a Southern city and Southern culture and attitudes being among the biggest factors. It’s probably also why Louisville really hasn’t graduated to being a top tier city even though its not going to ever be a large US metro area it could still be a lot better than what it really is. Which is a southern town with the Mayberry complex that doesn’t really know what it wants to be when it grows up. Most of that you can chalk up to Kentucky being one of the most backwards economically and socially as well as in the quality of education.
I spent a few years of life in the Chicago region and the difference between say Northern Indiana, SW Michigan and NE Illinois and what you will find in the Southern 1/3 of Indiana and Kentucky is like night and day. Of course, there are racists in all places but in Kentucky and Southern Indiana its more of a cultural stigma that we might get afraid of those people of different color in those big bad cities.
What’s quite hilarious is that I’ve been told by native Kentuckians and people in Southern Indiana that I should move to Chicago because I don’t share their Southern cultural values in this region. What’s comical about that is that they have more in common with the poorer parts of Chicago than I really do in that the South Side of Chicago is actually about equal in per capita income and family income as Southern Indiana and Kentucky. The only real difference is based on skin color and crime issues. The education level in most of the South End of Chicago is about equivalent to the educational achievement level that one would find in most of the Kentucky and Southern Indiana.
A person that befriended me a few months ended up in the part of South Central Indiana where I live and her city of origin is Chicago, IL. When I first met her she noted that I said nothing negative about Chicago or the area around the lake stretching from Wisconsin state line all the way through Illinois, NW Indiana to Michigan. I told her that the reason why I didn’t end up as sour grapes when she mentioned Chicago was my 6 plus years in NW Indiana so I went to the city many times for relaxation, shopping, travel, etc. She said when Chicago is mentioned in these parts its like most people get all disgusted and turn their nose about a place 90 percent of them probably haven’t even been much less a region that they are putting down.
The difference is that I’ve lived near and around Chicago before and I’ve also lived in Kentucky for about the same amount of time just under a decade at some point. The differences couldn’t be any more different than night and day between the two regions at least for most of those areas. The one difference is that most of Kentucky economically, socially and educationally is much like what one would experience in the South Side of Chicago and certain NW Indiana areas like Hammond, Gary, etc where the incomes are closer together than one would think considering that Kentucky is 47th in the US income wise, 47th in median family income, etc. Just having topped over 50,000 a year in recent years and the average income of places in South Side of Chicago are pretty close. In fact, the South Side of Chicago has an average household income of 54,000 a year while in Kentucky its about 50,250 dollars so in fact all those Kentuckians and Southern Indiana residents talking about how much better they are than Chicago need to look really hard in the mirror.
I’ve even heard these derogatory comments among a lot of people from Louisville which isn’t exactly a peach of a city and nothing to really brag about. If anything, Kentucky is definitely in the South and has more in common with parts of dirt poor Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia than anywhere in the northern 1/2 to 1/3 of the country.
Louisville’s claim to fame is stuff like bourbon distilling, the Kentucky Derby, Muhammad Ali and basically rolling up the streets by about 9 pm on most nights unless you can find a dive bar or one of the few upscale establishments opening up around the downtown area or Main Street.
As far as the music scene in Lousiville, its that it mostly consists of country and or rock with a mix of grunge or alternative type bands that practice in a garage somewhere and sound like they’ve never taken any music training or classes in their lives. That’s why you don’t find quality and talented musicians coming out of the hills and hollers of Kentucky versus what you would find in other urban areas like Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta or elsewhere.
Kentucky likes to think that its Midwestern but its not anywhere close to being Midwestern in attitudes, educational levels, personal sensibilities and common sense. Its like a place where common sense mixed with quality education was sent to die and the mentality is alive and well. I never had any preconceived notions about Kentucky until I had lived there for a few years and I started looking at what kind of places I was living in as far as the culture and the quality of state and local governments and I was like “What the hell is wrong with these people?”
I was raised up to tell the truth, be honest, work hard and have self discipline and I don’t find a whole lot of that in the character of a lot of the people from Kentucky. Its like having a bunch of people with such shady and narcissistic outlook on everything that it clouds their judgment and potential because they refuse to adapt to the outside world.
It’s kind of like the educational system in many parts of Kentucky especially around Louisville being generally of such poor quality that half or more of the kids in high school can barely read and write at a 12th grade level much less understand harder concepts that they will have to master in trade schools and college training. That’s why a good deal of them have to take remedial classes at the University of Louisville, UK, Kentucky Technical Colleges like KCTCS, etc.
The schools are so crappy that even my in-laws in Kentucky actually had to pay extra money to have their daughters children educated in a Christian type of school as the public education system in Kentucky is so bad that it ranks constantly in the bottom 10 states of the USA in most years. Not to mention that Kentucky ranks 47th in educational achievement which is at least a dozen places below or more than most Midwest states like Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc.
That’s another big difference between most Midwestern states and Kentucky and that’s the difference in quality of education and quality of colleges whereas the University of Louisville only ranks like 165th out of all of the top colleges in America and University of Kentucky is only about 125th. This despite those two schools being supposedly the best that Kentucky really has to offer and they can’t even make the top 100 colleges and universities in most every discipline. Not even in engineering does U of L rank in the top 100 and not even in law schools. That’s despite that university having one of the largest endowments in the entire nation that it can’t even place above many other schools with less in the way of resources.
It’s those sorts of things that really count along with the large state land grant colleges that were started in the North like Indiana, Purdue, Michigan State, U Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin and then other schools of good academic standing like Notre Dame, Northwestern, Iowa, Minnesota, etc.
The Louisville Mentality: Some More Of The Finery of Kentucky
This post is in response to some of the culturally inbred jackasses of Kentucky and especially Louisville where they think its cool and hip to be a total smartass and trash bathrooms and public facilities. I guess they don't think that other people use public facilities as well as people that have to clean them as part of their jobs or they simply don't care. Since, Louisville seems to exhibit this mentality with people dumping in toilets and then leaving a mess all over the floors and seats and trashing bathrooms its high time someone talked about the Louisville mentality that seems to be quite prevalent.
It reminds me of living in Louisville for several years seeing how even in big box stores like Home Depot, Lowes or other businesses located in Louisville the clientele if you can call them that would go to no ends to crap in a toilet and leave a mess for everyone else to deal with including the poor schmucks that had to clean up after these illiterate and often totally uneducated and mentally debased Neanderthals. The following is a Reddit post that was taken down by the Louisville/LouBilly moderators because they didn't like how I was pointing out how their colleagues from Louisville and other posters thought it was funny and cool that someone shit all over the place and left a mess for the employees to clean up. As if Louisville and much of its citizenry doesn't have enough common sense to use a bathroom correctly. Then again in a city where the average IQ is about 70 to 85 its not totally a surprise.
It reminds me of living in Louisville for several years seeing how even in big box stores like Home Depot, Lowes or other businesses located in Louisville the clientele if you can call them that would go to no ends to crap in a toilet and leave a mess for everyone else to deal with including the poor schmucks that had to clean up after these illiterate and often totally uneducated and mentally debased Neanderthals. The following is a Reddit post that was taken down by the Louisville/LouBilly moderators because they didn't like how I was pointing out how their colleagues from Louisville and other posters thought it was funny and cool that someone shit all over the place and left a mess for the employees to clean up. As if Louisville and much of its citizenry doesn't have enough common sense to use a bathroom correctly. Then again in a city where the average IQ is about 70 to 85 its not totally a surprise.
Typical Louisville Mentality to act like a total jackass and then leave a mess for everyone involved. Not including your fellow patrons at the restaurant that had to see that sort of thing but also the person that had to go in there and clean up after this idiot. Classy.....then again its Louisville which might as well be a skidmark on the underpants of society. The best thing that could happen to Louisville by and large would either be the Ohio River bursting through the flood walls and some point and wipe the majority of the city off the map or a big fucking tornado going through most of it and cleaning the landscape like a scouring pad.
I seen shit like this when I lived in Louisville from about 2004 to 2013 and that's why I am glad I don't live there anymore. Hell, I feel sorry for the decent people and there are very few of them that still live in that urban shithole. Actually, I have nothing against cities, in fact I live in one with almost a million people now but the facts are that Louisville, Kentucky is a special kind of shitty place once you've really lived most other places in about 90 percent of the country.
The problem with Louisville is that its really one big white ghetto transplanted by people with hundreds of years passing through Appalachia who were mostly ignoramuses and morons that couldn't cut it anywhere else. If you took the far East End say from St. Matthews over to the Simpsonville area away and north from Prospect and Oldham down to the Bullitt County line what would you have? Mississippi or better yet some shithole in some other state like West Virginia or Arkansas.
The fact that some reddit people mostly from Louisville thinks this is actually cool tells me most of what I would need to know about Louisville as if I couldn't tell it by driving through on my trips to Tennessee, the Gulf Coast or elsewhere. That most people there really don't give a shit about their fellow humans that would have to clean up after them when they crap all over the place. So instead of being a real man and going to the manager to complain or simply taking the complaint to a higher level manager or corporate, you decided to be a LOUISVILLE DOUCHEBAG and then take a dump in the can and make a mess with all of the toilet paper.
Classy....and about as classy as the rednecks in Kentucky that burn couches in the middle of the streets in Lexington when Kentucky has its one shining moment in its only real claim to fame called basketball. SO the rednecks will throw trash all over the ground, break bottles, start fires and burn couches in the middle of the streets as well as flip over people's cars because they don't give a shit.
Right there you just showed me the LouBilly mentality which is why Louisville is nothing more than a bunch of undereducated, backwoods, bubba neanderthals that are just one step above gorillas and chimps throwing shit at each other in the Cincinnati Zoo or Louisville Zoo. It remind me of the last time I passed through Kentucky going South in 2019 with trash everywhere and the streets littered with plastic waste, cigarette butts, broken bottles and cans everywhere and looked like someone dumped out the trash from their jacked up jalopy of a car. Way to go Louisville!!
P.S. Since the KY Derby is coming up in a couple of months you better get cleaning the roadways around the sordid city of Louisville that way your guests and the high rollers coming from outside of Louisville won't realize what a major league shithole your city is. Just like you all do every year during March, April until the Derby and then by June 1st it looks like everyone in Louisville emptied the contents of their ride out into the streets all over again. What a bunch of damn pigs and morons exist in Loserville.
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Kentucky And Its Lacking Culture
Even as someone that despises Kentucky “culture” and society in general in Kentucky, I don’t think that’s a fair assessment and I probably dislike Kentucky and most of the people I’ve met there probably more than most people. I had the opportunity to visit about 100 out of the 120 counties of Kentucky and while it sucks there is no slave trading and such. The problem is the economy in Kentucky, the poor educational system that keeps people dumb and ignorant of the rest of the world and of course they double standards and hypocrisy that is all over Kentucky from the smallest towns to cities like Louisville. The problem with Kentucky is that most of it is a toilet with just nice scenery. If it was based on scenery in Kentucky I would live there in a heartbeat.
However, the people are generally D and F grade people overall with very few A and B type people that makes somewhere a good place to live. The schools are generally horrid and the people that graduate from them have virtually little knowledge of the outside world. Even in Louisville, much of the population can barely get out of its own area of the city which is only about 25 miles from east to west and 15 miles from North to South in Jefferson County.
You wouldn’t believe the amount and percentage of people in Jefferson County that haven’t been to the other parts of their own city area to see how the other 1/3 lives as Louisville is a city of about 3 or 4 different cities. There is the West End which is primarily minority majority population of African Americans. Then you have the South End which is mostly white with a mix of African Americans, Latinos and Asians. Then you have the East End which is mostly highly majority white with a sprinkling of other groups that can live there because of their income and social status that allows them a certain amount of economic independence.
However, you don’t see a lot of people in Louisville intermingling with people of seriously different backgrounds as they stick to their own tribal areas and largely tribal boundaries. You’ve got people that live in South End who won’t go to the East End and vice versa. Most people won’t go to the West End because of crime of course but also a racial element as most West End areas are 90 percent black as well. Furthermore you can have people that live in Louisville all of their lives and don’t know how to get across the city to other businesses, cultural events, social gatherings etc because they never get out of the 10 square mile area of the city where they live.
I’ve seen this plenty of times in the South End and the East End because in both of those areas there are enough retail businesses and other businesses to meet demand of the people in those areas. So what happens is that people get in their little cocoon of an area and rarely leave it. The goes for people in Kentucky not really knowing anything about surrounding states or other parts of America much less other countries. They don’t travel much unless its to the Redneck Riviera of Florida and Alabama for vacation and then of course for UK basketball or other sporting events.
In many cases, its a challenge for them to even make it as far as Cincinnati or Indianapolis or St. Louis or Nashville not because they can’t go to those places but because they don’t interested in learning about other cultures or places. The whole mentality that somehow Kentucky is the end all be all of human society and no one should criticize it or offer even constructive criticism of Kentucky and people get deeply offended over the smallest comment about Kentucky culture. I’ve never seen the mindset of a place where people get so offended over someone making constructive criticism of their state or the values of the people in that state. Much less actually present the facts about Kentucky such as it being 47th in the USA in just about every major category from things like personal and family income to educational achievement to health outcomes.
Don’t criticize Kentucky though is the general mantra you’ll get from native Kentuckians and others that are Kentucky centric type of individuals as they really do think they live in some sort of a heaven even though its quite apparent that economically, socially and educationally Kentucky is severely backwards. I didn’t have a negative view of Kentucky or any real preconceived notions about Kentucky before I moved there but after seeing the trash of Kentucky society in my face for several years from about 2005 until 2013 I can say that I wouldn’t want to live there again.
On the other hand if you like the good old boy system, vast public and social corruption, deadbeats who abuse the system and their fellow citizens and people with skewed moral and ethical values by and large then Kentucky is the place for you. I certainly wasn’t raised the way that obviously most people in Kentucky were raised and thank goodness for that because their values that they state and what they do is totally opposite in fact. Its funny too because you’re made to believe that Kentucky is a moral and religious society even though its quite apparent that the churches are largely places of social constructs rather than actually practicing ethical and moral values that would be in line with its religion.
Another thing you’ll be badgered about is your religion or church attendance or have someone constantly nitpicking about how you need to come join their congregation even though plenty of their own types don’t practice what they preach. Hypocritical of course but outright meanness at the best that despite of their religious talk they treat a lot of people like crap including religious minorities, blacks, Hispanics and anyone different than them. Not to mention the little cliques that you find in Kentucky society in people that should know better but if you’re not one of them then you’re either dead to them or they are going to be outright hostile.
It’s funny that they talk about Kentucky family values but I’ve seen their family values such as adultery on a grand scale, outright lying, bending the truth, theft and just general white trash type of behavior that most people with any moral and ethical scruples anywhere else would find abhorrent. If you like that sort of thing then Kentucky would be for you, if you’ve been raised with some sort of ethical and moral truth or in a community where such behavior is frowned upon then Kentucky is someplace that is foreign and alien to your ethics and morals.
Some of us especially in rural America and the Northern states weren’t raised that way and while we have our own problem with people misbehaving or being total leeches on society we also don’t smile upon it and look approvingly while some inbred yahoo shouts about Jay-Sus and either handle snakes or has some view that everyone that doesn’t follow their particular brand of hypocritical religion is going to hell.
The problem ties back into the fact that the educational system in Kentucky is so poor and backwards not because of lack of funding but the type of people in the state and the education system itself. Actually, school spending in Kentucky is about 11,000 dollars a year which is actually more than my current state of Indiana yet Kentucky regularly ranks anywhere from 41st to 47th in education for K-12 students not to mention 43rd in the quality of its post-secondary educational activities. Not to mention that Kentucky is 47th in the country in educational attainment.
Even worse is that Kentucky does such a bad job in educating its citizens that about 50 plus percent of Kentucky high school students actually fail to meet the standards of reading, writing, comprehension, math and science at grade level. In 2018, Kentucky students were proficient to excelling in English composition, vocabulary and spelling and writing at a 52 percent level. Which means that about half aren’t capable of reading, writing and communicating at a 10th to 12th grade level when these tests are given.
The same goes for math but its much worse as only about 44 percent of Kentucky students are proficient at 12th grade math skills as well as only about 37 percent are proficient at high school level science.
That explains a lot of things to me including the fact that Kentucky has about 900,000 people considered as functionally illiterate and incapable of doing basic tasks, basic jobs, filling out job applications, inability to write and reason intelligently to the point that the state knows this and it comprises about 20 percent of the population.
However, its much worse than that because I would say that as much as 35 or 40 percent of the people I’ve encountered in my travels to Kentucky and about 100 out of 120 counties were that way or you could tell that something was quite off mentally and educationally. I mean, the personal anecdotes and stories that I could tell you about my dealing with Kentucky society is just mind blowing in so many ways.
It’s not even based on emotion or arguments its based on facts and Kentucky is short on facts or at least the average Kentuckian is short on facts, figures, logic, reason and or common sense in many cases. What would go for common sense in most places in Kentucky would be considered as something not very intelligent people would do elsewhere. Yes, its really that bad that Kentucky seems to have serious problems using common sense, logic and reason to solve problems After most of that I just had to leave because I couldn’t tolerate in general such mind blowing stupidity in my everyday dealings with people from Kentucky.
I don’t find that to generally be the case in the North with most people having at least enough common sense to see through stupidity for being what it is. In Kentucky, its acceptable and celebrated to behave in less than dignified or often stupid ways and then act as if the other person has a problem. Of course, when you have a limited amount of intellect and common sense like so many in Kentucky have you’re not dealing with rocket scientists here. That is acceptable in Kentucky but it wouldn’t be acceptable in most other states in the West, Northern tier states and Northeast US. Maybe in some places in the South it would be acceptable but that’s much of the US South for you.
Add in the fact that Kentucky ranks so poorly in healthcare being one of the worst states, worst state for retirees, worst government state in the country and 3rd worst pension problem. You can also notice that Kentucky infrastructure development is about at 3rd world levels with thousands of bridges that are structurally deficient and gets a D grade from American Society of Civil Engineers.
Kentucky has a lot of issues with how they run government as well. For example one of the stupidest things is having the county clerks office issue drivers licenses and personal identification but then having to go to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to register your vehicle so you have to go two different places to get an ID and the paperwork and then go to the BMV to register your vehicle, boat, or motorcycle, etc.
That’s plain stupid to have a system that has multiple redundancies of government. Add in that Louisville is one of the most taxed cities in the country being 4th highest in taxes and its no wonder the Louisville economy is backwards and underdeveloped in many ways. Their mentality is to create more low wage jobs and low wage warehousing positions because that is the only thing that most of the people can actually handle by and large.
Not to mention Kentucky is economically and fiscally busted in many ways without having money to fix its increasingly collapsing infrastructure and broken roadways and bridges. Not to mention having the 3rd worst funded pension system with huge billions of dollars shortfalls where the state legislators both Republican and Democrat have kicked the can down the road for decades and not funding pensions and allowing double dipping. The only two other states that are worse funded pensions are Illinois and California being the worst states for funding state pensions.
Add in the fact that Kentucky income tax for a family making between 8,000 to 75,000 is about 5.8 percent which is much higher than neighboring Indiana and its 6 percent for anyone making over 75,000 whereas Indiana pays half the taxes at just over 3.2 percent of total income. So you get twice as much of a tax burden out of Kentucky yet about half of the services and more inefficiency and stupidity when it comes to Kentucky government and society. No thank you.
Louisville is one of the highest taxed cities in the country rivaling places like Chicago, NYC etc when it comes to overall tax burden. In fact, the average Louisville resident pays state and local tax burden of about 8 percent and that’s just on income and property taxes are increasingly eating up more of ones income as well. In Indianapolis, Indiana at 110 miles away the average local tax burden is about 5 percent with the state taking 3.1 percent and the local city Unigov taking about 1.9 percent and property taxes are just about equal. All so you can deal with Kentucky and its archaic laws, backwards society and equally horrible school systems.
Those are the real problems with Kentucky which no one wants to really acknowledge and talk about which is why Kentucky remains in many ways in the dark ages as far as US states perform and work.
However, the people are generally D and F grade people overall with very few A and B type people that makes somewhere a good place to live. The schools are generally horrid and the people that graduate from them have virtually little knowledge of the outside world. Even in Louisville, much of the population can barely get out of its own area of the city which is only about 25 miles from east to west and 15 miles from North to South in Jefferson County.
You wouldn’t believe the amount and percentage of people in Jefferson County that haven’t been to the other parts of their own city area to see how the other 1/3 lives as Louisville is a city of about 3 or 4 different cities. There is the West End which is primarily minority majority population of African Americans. Then you have the South End which is mostly white with a mix of African Americans, Latinos and Asians. Then you have the East End which is mostly highly majority white with a sprinkling of other groups that can live there because of their income and social status that allows them a certain amount of economic independence.
However, you don’t see a lot of people in Louisville intermingling with people of seriously different backgrounds as they stick to their own tribal areas and largely tribal boundaries. You’ve got people that live in South End who won’t go to the East End and vice versa. Most people won’t go to the West End because of crime of course but also a racial element as most West End areas are 90 percent black as well. Furthermore you can have people that live in Louisville all of their lives and don’t know how to get across the city to other businesses, cultural events, social gatherings etc because they never get out of the 10 square mile area of the city where they live.
I’ve seen this plenty of times in the South End and the East End because in both of those areas there are enough retail businesses and other businesses to meet demand of the people in those areas. So what happens is that people get in their little cocoon of an area and rarely leave it. The goes for people in Kentucky not really knowing anything about surrounding states or other parts of America much less other countries. They don’t travel much unless its to the Redneck Riviera of Florida and Alabama for vacation and then of course for UK basketball or other sporting events.
In many cases, its a challenge for them to even make it as far as Cincinnati or Indianapolis or St. Louis or Nashville not because they can’t go to those places but because they don’t interested in learning about other cultures or places. The whole mentality that somehow Kentucky is the end all be all of human society and no one should criticize it or offer even constructive criticism of Kentucky and people get deeply offended over the smallest comment about Kentucky culture. I’ve never seen the mindset of a place where people get so offended over someone making constructive criticism of their state or the values of the people in that state. Much less actually present the facts about Kentucky such as it being 47th in the USA in just about every major category from things like personal and family income to educational achievement to health outcomes.
Don’t criticize Kentucky though is the general mantra you’ll get from native Kentuckians and others that are Kentucky centric type of individuals as they really do think they live in some sort of a heaven even though its quite apparent that economically, socially and educationally Kentucky is severely backwards. I didn’t have a negative view of Kentucky or any real preconceived notions about Kentucky before I moved there but after seeing the trash of Kentucky society in my face for several years from about 2005 until 2013 I can say that I wouldn’t want to live there again.
On the other hand if you like the good old boy system, vast public and social corruption, deadbeats who abuse the system and their fellow citizens and people with skewed moral and ethical values by and large then Kentucky is the place for you. I certainly wasn’t raised the way that obviously most people in Kentucky were raised and thank goodness for that because their values that they state and what they do is totally opposite in fact. Its funny too because you’re made to believe that Kentucky is a moral and religious society even though its quite apparent that the churches are largely places of social constructs rather than actually practicing ethical and moral values that would be in line with its religion.
Another thing you’ll be badgered about is your religion or church attendance or have someone constantly nitpicking about how you need to come join their congregation even though plenty of their own types don’t practice what they preach. Hypocritical of course but outright meanness at the best that despite of their religious talk they treat a lot of people like crap including religious minorities, blacks, Hispanics and anyone different than them. Not to mention the little cliques that you find in Kentucky society in people that should know better but if you’re not one of them then you’re either dead to them or they are going to be outright hostile.
It’s funny that they talk about Kentucky family values but I’ve seen their family values such as adultery on a grand scale, outright lying, bending the truth, theft and just general white trash type of behavior that most people with any moral and ethical scruples anywhere else would find abhorrent. If you like that sort of thing then Kentucky would be for you, if you’ve been raised with some sort of ethical and moral truth or in a community where such behavior is frowned upon then Kentucky is someplace that is foreign and alien to your ethics and morals.
Some of us especially in rural America and the Northern states weren’t raised that way and while we have our own problem with people misbehaving or being total leeches on society we also don’t smile upon it and look approvingly while some inbred yahoo shouts about Jay-Sus and either handle snakes or has some view that everyone that doesn’t follow their particular brand of hypocritical religion is going to hell.
The problem ties back into the fact that the educational system in Kentucky is so poor and backwards not because of lack of funding but the type of people in the state and the education system itself. Actually, school spending in Kentucky is about 11,000 dollars a year which is actually more than my current state of Indiana yet Kentucky regularly ranks anywhere from 41st to 47th in education for K-12 students not to mention 43rd in the quality of its post-secondary educational activities. Not to mention that Kentucky is 47th in the country in educational attainment.
Even worse is that Kentucky does such a bad job in educating its citizens that about 50 plus percent of Kentucky high school students actually fail to meet the standards of reading, writing, comprehension, math and science at grade level. In 2018, Kentucky students were proficient to excelling in English composition, vocabulary and spelling and writing at a 52 percent level. Which means that about half aren’t capable of reading, writing and communicating at a 10th to 12th grade level when these tests are given.
The same goes for math but its much worse as only about 44 percent of Kentucky students are proficient at 12th grade math skills as well as only about 37 percent are proficient at high school level science.
That explains a lot of things to me including the fact that Kentucky has about 900,000 people considered as functionally illiterate and incapable of doing basic tasks, basic jobs, filling out job applications, inability to write and reason intelligently to the point that the state knows this and it comprises about 20 percent of the population.
However, its much worse than that because I would say that as much as 35 or 40 percent of the people I’ve encountered in my travels to Kentucky and about 100 out of 120 counties were that way or you could tell that something was quite off mentally and educationally. I mean, the personal anecdotes and stories that I could tell you about my dealing with Kentucky society is just mind blowing in so many ways.
It’s not even based on emotion or arguments its based on facts and Kentucky is short on facts or at least the average Kentuckian is short on facts, figures, logic, reason and or common sense in many cases. What would go for common sense in most places in Kentucky would be considered as something not very intelligent people would do elsewhere. Yes, its really that bad that Kentucky seems to have serious problems using common sense, logic and reason to solve problems After most of that I just had to leave because I couldn’t tolerate in general such mind blowing stupidity in my everyday dealings with people from Kentucky.
I don’t find that to generally be the case in the North with most people having at least enough common sense to see through stupidity for being what it is. In Kentucky, its acceptable and celebrated to behave in less than dignified or often stupid ways and then act as if the other person has a problem. Of course, when you have a limited amount of intellect and common sense like so many in Kentucky have you’re not dealing with rocket scientists here. That is acceptable in Kentucky but it wouldn’t be acceptable in most other states in the West, Northern tier states and Northeast US. Maybe in some places in the South it would be acceptable but that’s much of the US South for you.
Add in the fact that Kentucky ranks so poorly in healthcare being one of the worst states, worst state for retirees, worst government state in the country and 3rd worst pension problem. You can also notice that Kentucky infrastructure development is about at 3rd world levels with thousands of bridges that are structurally deficient and gets a D grade from American Society of Civil Engineers.
Kentucky has a lot of issues with how they run government as well. For example one of the stupidest things is having the county clerks office issue drivers licenses and personal identification but then having to go to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to register your vehicle so you have to go two different places to get an ID and the paperwork and then go to the BMV to register your vehicle, boat, or motorcycle, etc.
That’s plain stupid to have a system that has multiple redundancies of government. Add in that Louisville is one of the most taxed cities in the country being 4th highest in taxes and its no wonder the Louisville economy is backwards and underdeveloped in many ways. Their mentality is to create more low wage jobs and low wage warehousing positions because that is the only thing that most of the people can actually handle by and large.
Not to mention Kentucky is economically and fiscally busted in many ways without having money to fix its increasingly collapsing infrastructure and broken roadways and bridges. Not to mention having the 3rd worst funded pension system with huge billions of dollars shortfalls where the state legislators both Republican and Democrat have kicked the can down the road for decades and not funding pensions and allowing double dipping. The only two other states that are worse funded pensions are Illinois and California being the worst states for funding state pensions.
Add in the fact that Kentucky income tax for a family making between 8,000 to 75,000 is about 5.8 percent which is much higher than neighboring Indiana and its 6 percent for anyone making over 75,000 whereas Indiana pays half the taxes at just over 3.2 percent of total income. So you get twice as much of a tax burden out of Kentucky yet about half of the services and more inefficiency and stupidity when it comes to Kentucky government and society. No thank you.
Louisville is one of the highest taxed cities in the country rivaling places like Chicago, NYC etc when it comes to overall tax burden. In fact, the average Louisville resident pays state and local tax burden of about 8 percent and that’s just on income and property taxes are increasingly eating up more of ones income as well. In Indianapolis, Indiana at 110 miles away the average local tax burden is about 5 percent with the state taking 3.1 percent and the local city Unigov taking about 1.9 percent and property taxes are just about equal. All so you can deal with Kentucky and its archaic laws, backwards society and equally horrible school systems.
Those are the real problems with Kentucky which no one wants to really acknowledge and talk about which is why Kentucky remains in many ways in the dark ages as far as US states perform and work.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Louisville Sucks Part II......French For Louisville Suce Deuxième Partie
Since Louisville was named after King Louie I think a little bit of French would be most appropriate for the Possibility City that should called Possum Billy City and increasingly sucks for most of the residents of Louisville. Here is part two of Louisville Sucks or as some of the local even write that Louisville Sux.
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Along
with the urban infrastructure debacle of 2009 until present, the city
despite being the 4th largest taxed city in the nation is also a
chronic waste of economic resources despite the high tax burden it
places on its resident and business community.
Dixie
Highway isn't the only place in Louisville that is a problem when it
comes to infrastructure and issues with falling apart infrastructure.
You can pretty much circle most streets in downtown Louisville, KY as
being bombed out cratered streets because of the lack of care and
maintaining such roadwork.
Instead,
Louisville's liberal leaning mayor has all of these mentally unhinged
ideas about sustainability and how he's going to make Louisville into
a sustainable city despite the fact that his city is falling apart at
the seams and with a weak economy and unsustainable debt issues not
only with the city but the publicly controlled Louisville Water
Company and Metropolitan Sewer District respectively LWC and MSD for
abbreviation.
LWC
can barely function being a mayor appointed public corporation where
the mayor of Louisville appoints those who run the government office.
Same with MSD being appointees and none too efficient seeing that
they've been running a debt of over 4 billion dollars. All for a city
and a service area of perhaps less than 800,000 people.
Former
Louisville Mayor and Lt. Governor Jerry Abramson oversaw MSD and LWC
during the years prior to current Mayor Greg Fischer got his hands
involved in the mess and has done nothing to really help anything.
Add in the fact that MSD spends and screws the ratepayers into the
ground every chance they get adds to the angst that many in the
community has towards the MSD.
Another
reason why Louisville sucks is the mamby pamby work done by the
Police Chief Steve Conrad and Mayor Greg Fischer to law and order
issues. Instead of cracking down on crime and going after those
enablers and criminals that are terrorizing the community, they
choose to ignore the problem or try to approach it with a politically
correct angle. Therefore, this politically correct nonsense is
further reason why in the last several years the crime problems in
Louisville, KY have spiked including a spike in murders to where
murders are at least 1.5 to 2 times more than they were only a very
few years ago. The 2016 Murder Count for Louisville, KY was 123 and
the 2017 count today November 1, 2017 is 141 with two months
remaining in the year.
Louisville
sucks also because of the unsustainable low wage economy that has
been created in the city over the past several decades. Louisville
used to have a higher wage structure economy than just about anywhere
that a person could get a good job and own a home and nice vehicle.
However, that is and has been going away for some time now since
those manufacturing jobs have been sent off to Mexico, China, and
other Third World sweatshops.
The
Louisville Solution: Have more service jobs and low wage employers
flipping boxes at part time hours and part time pay. Then maybe these
people might go full time although they'll entice you with the
Metroversity program, etc. If not, you can find one of the low wage
8.50 an hour or 9 dollar an hour job working at one of the fine
warehouses around the city that have been springing up for the past
couple of decades. All with extra tax breaks and economic incentives
while the taxpayer continues to get screwed into the ground.
If
that doesn't work for you, then Louisville has plenty of temporary
jobs working for maybe 2 or 3 months a year until you are unemployed
all over again or laid off like so many people go through at various
low wage employers.
Louisville Sucks...But You Already Knew That and You Definitely Know That Most of Kentucky Sucks Too
One
might think this is a website primarily based on a dislike of the
Louisville Cardinals athletic teams which comes out of a university
that masquerades as an athletic program but this is so much more than
that.
The
purpose of this site is to bring into the open hard hitting news and
commentary about Louisville, Kentucky and some of the surrounding
Kentucky counties that are often associated with Louisville including
those areas in Kentucky systematically included as part of the
Louisville Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Louisville
sucks because a large part of it is due to Louisville Metro
Government or ie. the Metro Council and Mayor which makes policy for
the city and Jefferson County of which Louisville Metro now controls
the majority of in essence because its taxing district and law
enforcement patrols the entire county. Louisville sucks because
economically it is a cesspool in what could be a highly prosperous
metro area. Louisville sucks because its the 4th highest taxed US
city with a crumbling infrastructure, shitty roads, lousy public
services, corrupt government, and a populace that doesn't in most
cases give two healthy shits about the crime and crap that goes on in
their city.
Louisville
sucks because of the antiquated and bombed out infrastructure which
resembles something akin to Dresden in the 1940s despite a very high
tax rate on individual taxpayers are hosed as well as individual
business and small businesses. Louisville sucks because of political
correctness and having a mayor and police department that is more
interested in not stepping on the toes of the criminal class and a
certain voting bloc.
Louisville
sucks because its school system regularly ranks in the bottom 25
percent of the schools in the entire Commonwealth of Kentucky. A
state that isn't exactly among the brightest in the box of crayons
nor very sharp to start with and a US state that ranks well in the
40s when it comes to public K 12 education. Not to mention 47th in
the United States in percentage of its residents with a college
degree or post secondary training of some sort.
The
JCPS (Jefferson County Public Schools) at last glance ranked 127th
out of 160 some Kentucky school systems. Even down from 118th a few
years out of 154 school systems which ranked it in the bottom 25
percent of all Kentucky school systems.
Louisville
sucks because at large it has an ineffectual system of government
along with a system of incompetence and government corruption that
makes it look like the Chicago of the Ohio River Valley. Louisville
sucks because it spent 350 million on an arena to give it away for
next to nothing so the local college basketball team could play in it
for years for next to nothing in rent. All the while the interest on
the facility was in the 17 million a year range and the city couldn't
come up with enough tax revenue from its Tax Increment Financing
district to pay for the arena (which its backers and local
politicians claimed that it would do). All the while blowing away 17
million a year just on interest until the principal was due to start
payment in 2020 at approximately 16 to 17.5 million a year based on
350 million dollar cost of the facility.
All
because they have no NHL team, no NBA, and only two college teams U
of L men's and women's along with a smattering of concerts to support
a facility. Meanwhile the taxpayers end up supporting the arena
through their tax dollars (another thing promised that wouldn't
happen by POLITICIANS) at the tune of several million dollars per
year which is taken out of the city's general funding which instead
should be going to roads and infrastructure.
Louisville
sucks because the roadways are decrepit and falling apart all over
the city because the city ,stupidly I might add, decided that it
would be a great idea in 2009 to take over responsibilty for all
Kentucky designated and numbered roads in the city/county of
Jefferson. Of which they didn't have enough money or funding to keep
the roads repaired correctly and therefore they are falling apart.
Louisville and The Reformulated Gas Ripoff
Louisville has been selling reformulated gas for as long as I can remember at least back in the 1990s and possibly a few years before that into the 1980s due to supposed smog and pollution problems. One problem though was that reformulated gas was sold in Kentucky for many years while Indiana did not sell reformulated gas and it was usually 20 to 30 cents cheaper by driving down the expressway 5 miles into Indiana and then getting the non-reformulated gas. Suckers!
Just like when Lousyville had vehicle emissions testing back in the 1980s and an older friend went to have his old vehicle tested. The first time it wouldn't pass so he took it back later and it wouldn't pass a second time and the next time it didn't pass but the inspector on duty went ahead and gave him the inspection sticker and passed it anyway. That's the type of corrupt crap that Louisville, Kentucky has been doing for a couple of generations. Maybe this eventually will pass the Kentucky State Cadavers (Legislature) and actually become law to at least save the increasingly stressed and impoverished Louisville residents some money. Of course, the ultra liberal talking heads and government officials in Louisville will have their heads explode but they haven't been using their brains much over the years anyway.
https://www.wdrb.com/news/business/bill-aimed-at-ending-reformulated-gas-in-louisville-takes-step/article_0387191e-3950-11ea-b1ab-037101a8a20e.html
Just like when Lousyville had vehicle emissions testing back in the 1980s and an older friend went to have his old vehicle tested. The first time it wouldn't pass so he took it back later and it wouldn't pass a second time and the next time it didn't pass but the inspector on duty went ahead and gave him the inspection sticker and passed it anyway. That's the type of corrupt crap that Louisville, Kentucky has been doing for a couple of generations. Maybe this eventually will pass the Kentucky State Cadavers (Legislature) and actually become law to at least save the increasingly stressed and impoverished Louisville residents some money. Of course, the ultra liberal talking heads and government officials in Louisville will have their heads explode but they haven't been using their brains much over the years anyway.
https://www.wdrb.com/news/business/bill-aimed-at-ending-reformulated-gas-in-louisville-takes-step/article_0387191e-3950-11ea-b1ab-037101a8a20e.html
Another Day In Kentucky
It's another day in Kentucky where standards are so low and virtually no one cares until someone important gets slapped over violating labor laws and various other things. Now if this is going on at one place in Louisville and one company that owns all of these businesses how many other labor and law violations are occurring at other businesses in the city of Louisville and Commonwealth of Kentucky?
https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/restaurant-company-owned-by-louisville-s-bridgeman-family-hit-with/article_8fbed57a-3bc1-11ea-b763-576f9026e30b.html
https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/restaurant-company-owned-by-louisville-s-bridgeman-family-hit-with/article_8fbed57a-3bc1-11ea-b763-576f9026e30b.html
Louisville: Murder City of the Ohio Valley....It's Not Pittsburgh or even Cincinnati....It's Possibility City or Better Called Possum Billy City
The crime infested city of Louisville again makes the news for the fact that already in 2020 there have been multiple shootings and multiple homicides in just 20 days of the New Year
Another Indication That Kentucky Sucks and Louisville Sucks Just As Well as the rest of Kentucky.
Imagine this that Kentucky has the most corrupt government in the whole country. Just another indication that Louisville sucks and Kentucky sucks as well.
https://louisvillefuture.com/archived-news/harvard-study-kentuckys-state-government-one-corrupt-country/
https://louisvillefuture.com/archived-news/harvard-study-kentuckys-state-government-one-corrupt-country/
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Imagine..........Louisville Is Basically Broke Again Part Two
Long having been a city ran by an incompetent government and business community Louisville, Kentucky has long been ran by incompetent yes men and bureaucrats. This type of quisling behavior has long been noted by those who aren't from the local political class and business community that talks a good game but delivers very little. Of course, that of which they can't steal from either the public treasury or their employees by skimming the little they get in decent pay and benefits from their increasingly smaller paychecks. Maybe that's why Louisville has one of the largest homeless populations in a city with only 770,000 people and a metro population of 1.2 million over several surrounding counties including Louisville Metro but also in Southern Indiana and Central Kentucky also called Kentuckiana.
The interesting thing is that Louisville is supposedly a crossroads of the lower Midwest and upper South but can't seem to get its act together and be able to get out of its own way. This can be noted in the fact that Louisville has a lot of things going for it including a large navigable river, one of the larger airports that could be used for increasing the level of shipping via air of which there is some done. Not to mention near the middle of the Eastern US with links to surrounding cities such as Cincinnati, Nashville, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Columbus and many others within a days of driving distance of 12 hours.
Yet it remains a stagnant economic backwater in the Commonwealth of Kentucky which is a state that has long ranked at the bottom of the economic spectrum with ranking 47th in personal income, 47th in family income, 47th in median income, 47th in educational attainment, 43rd in quality of its universities, 41st or worst in K-12 education which it has ranked near the bottom of US states for decades. Even worse is that Kentucky schools are such cesspits of total incompetence that only about 44 percent of high school students in 2018-2019 were proficient or better in high school level reading. Mathematics and science scores are even worse with scores respectively about 40 percent and 36 percent in each category. That's the extent that Kentucky schools have been mismanaged for years along with a state government which has been mismanaged to the extent that its considered the worst ran state government in the entire United States by Governing Magazine.
Even worse is that Kentucky despite billions in revenues over the past decade has been unable to manage its state finances to the point that it has the 3rd worst state pension problem in the United States with a shortfall of 37 billion in 2018 dollars. Considering at that time being only better than California and Illinois who have worse pension problems but also state populations 8 times that of Kentucky in the case of California and 2.5 times that for Illinois. Here's a nice article that discusses this.
https://theintercept.com/2018/10/21/kentucky-pensions-crisis-hedge-funds/
Interesting that Kentucky continues to kick the can down the road while the common people suffer from lack of investment, horrid educational outcomes, a third world infrastructure that is billions overdue on basic investment just to get the road infrastructure graded at an C level by the various engineering societies that grade roads in every state. Despite this, Kentucky just partnered with the neighboring state of Indiana on a 4 billion dollar project to build two new bridges over the Ohio River in Louisville that is relying on tolling existing interstate crossings to pay because Kentucky is so fiscally busted that it cannot afford to pay for it out of existing revenue.
Even worse is that Kentucky's roadways and bridges were ranked at a D level in most of the past several years having received a C- for the year 2019. Here are a couple of articles that discuss this problem of how Kentucky has basically let its infrastructure go to pot so to speak.
https://www.wvxu.org/post/kentucky-receives-c-grade-its-aging-infrastructure#stream/0
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/state-item/kentucky/
Of course in Kentucky, priorities are seriously skewed when cities such as Louisville received a brand spanking new basketball arena in 2010 that has never been able to pay for itself out of the TIF financing bonds that were issued and paid for by TIF tax dollars of the Louisville downtown restaurant and bar district. Interestingly though that Louisville between 2010 and 2020 was scheduled to only pay the 15-17 million dollar a year payments just on the interest yet the arena authority and the TIF district fell way below these projections.
Even worse is that the city of Louisville for most of the decade had to pay to keep the arena and the Louisville Arena Authority district financially solvent by the tune of the city first starting payments of 7 million a year which later increased to over 10 million dollars a year over 30 years for whopping total of 300 million dollars. Of which the city of Louisville doesn't even have the money to fix its city employees pension problems as well as fixing city streets and infrastructure. Here's another article about the burgeoning debt of Louisville and its Arena Authority. Of course as usual Louisville strikes out again. These following articles show just about how smart the current and past leaders of Louisville Metro are and how none of the so-called Metro Council political butt kissers do nothing about it.
https://www.constructiondive.com/news/debts-for-kfc-yum-center-stadium-in-louisville-swell-to-1b/527917/
https://www.wdrb.com/news/despite-refinancing-louisville-arena-authority-to-make-higher-annual-kfc/article_60bcdd5b-c141-5f62-8105-819849c21ef9.html
I might also add that Lexington also spent a great deal of money on renovating the 44 year old Rupp Arena over the past several years in order to give it a new look and makeover at a time when the government in Kentucky couldn't pay their debt obligations and started to look for new taxes and fees with which to soak the citizenry. Nothing says priorities more than having two top twenty basketball programs in Kentucky while only 44 percent of students can read at grade level and 1 out of 10 adults have no teeth and have lost all of them due to lack of dental hygiene and poverty. Only in Kentucky could you be so incompetent in a supposedly first world nation.
Meanwhile, Kentucky's politicians of both parties have proven to be such losers that they cannot even stem the tide of the state losing money and becoming increasingly a poverty stricken economic basketcase with limited opportunities for its citizens that they have to increasingly go to other states in order to work and live. Meanwhile the population of Kentucky still increases with now about 20 percent of the state being functionally illiterate at a time of widespread literacy and 90 percent high school graduation rates. Of course, we know that many people pass through school due to social promotion and authorities just having to cover their rear ends to justify keeping their jobs and glossing over those left behind.
Of course, the 120 fiefdoms that consist of the 120 counties of Kentucky have a large number of incompetent and often stupid public officials that shouldn't even be in government to begin with and only get in due to name recognition and family ties. Here's looking at you in making Kentucky and even shittier place to live than it already has been for several decades. Its a good thing that Kentucky residents don't travel a whole lot outside of their little bubble in most rural areas because if they actually got out and experienced much of the United States other than the South they would realize how badly they've been getting screwed over the years.
The interesting thing is that Louisville is supposedly a crossroads of the lower Midwest and upper South but can't seem to get its act together and be able to get out of its own way. This can be noted in the fact that Louisville has a lot of things going for it including a large navigable river, one of the larger airports that could be used for increasing the level of shipping via air of which there is some done. Not to mention near the middle of the Eastern US with links to surrounding cities such as Cincinnati, Nashville, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Columbus and many others within a days of driving distance of 12 hours.
Yet it remains a stagnant economic backwater in the Commonwealth of Kentucky which is a state that has long ranked at the bottom of the economic spectrum with ranking 47th in personal income, 47th in family income, 47th in median income, 47th in educational attainment, 43rd in quality of its universities, 41st or worst in K-12 education which it has ranked near the bottom of US states for decades. Even worse is that Kentucky schools are such cesspits of total incompetence that only about 44 percent of high school students in 2018-2019 were proficient or better in high school level reading. Mathematics and science scores are even worse with scores respectively about 40 percent and 36 percent in each category. That's the extent that Kentucky schools have been mismanaged for years along with a state government which has been mismanaged to the extent that its considered the worst ran state government in the entire United States by Governing Magazine.
Even worse is that Kentucky despite billions in revenues over the past decade has been unable to manage its state finances to the point that it has the 3rd worst state pension problem in the United States with a shortfall of 37 billion in 2018 dollars. Considering at that time being only better than California and Illinois who have worse pension problems but also state populations 8 times that of Kentucky in the case of California and 2.5 times that for Illinois. Here's a nice article that discusses this.
https://theintercept.com/2018/10/21/kentucky-pensions-crisis-hedge-funds/
Interesting that Kentucky continues to kick the can down the road while the common people suffer from lack of investment, horrid educational outcomes, a third world infrastructure that is billions overdue on basic investment just to get the road infrastructure graded at an C level by the various engineering societies that grade roads in every state. Despite this, Kentucky just partnered with the neighboring state of Indiana on a 4 billion dollar project to build two new bridges over the Ohio River in Louisville that is relying on tolling existing interstate crossings to pay because Kentucky is so fiscally busted that it cannot afford to pay for it out of existing revenue.
Even worse is that Kentucky's roadways and bridges were ranked at a D level in most of the past several years having received a C- for the year 2019. Here are a couple of articles that discuss this problem of how Kentucky has basically let its infrastructure go to pot so to speak.
https://www.wvxu.org/post/kentucky-receives-c-grade-its-aging-infrastructure#stream/0
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/state-item/kentucky/
Of course in Kentucky, priorities are seriously skewed when cities such as Louisville received a brand spanking new basketball arena in 2010 that has never been able to pay for itself out of the TIF financing bonds that were issued and paid for by TIF tax dollars of the Louisville downtown restaurant and bar district. Interestingly though that Louisville between 2010 and 2020 was scheduled to only pay the 15-17 million dollar a year payments just on the interest yet the arena authority and the TIF district fell way below these projections.
Even worse is that the city of Louisville for most of the decade had to pay to keep the arena and the Louisville Arena Authority district financially solvent by the tune of the city first starting payments of 7 million a year which later increased to over 10 million dollars a year over 30 years for whopping total of 300 million dollars. Of which the city of Louisville doesn't even have the money to fix its city employees pension problems as well as fixing city streets and infrastructure. Here's another article about the burgeoning debt of Louisville and its Arena Authority. Of course as usual Louisville strikes out again. These following articles show just about how smart the current and past leaders of Louisville Metro are and how none of the so-called Metro Council political butt kissers do nothing about it.
https://www.constructiondive.com/news/debts-for-kfc-yum-center-stadium-in-louisville-swell-to-1b/527917/
https://www.wdrb.com/news/despite-refinancing-louisville-arena-authority-to-make-higher-annual-kfc/article_60bcdd5b-c141-5f62-8105-819849c21ef9.html
I might also add that Lexington also spent a great deal of money on renovating the 44 year old Rupp Arena over the past several years in order to give it a new look and makeover at a time when the government in Kentucky couldn't pay their debt obligations and started to look for new taxes and fees with which to soak the citizenry. Nothing says priorities more than having two top twenty basketball programs in Kentucky while only 44 percent of students can read at grade level and 1 out of 10 adults have no teeth and have lost all of them due to lack of dental hygiene and poverty. Only in Kentucky could you be so incompetent in a supposedly first world nation.
Meanwhile, Kentucky's politicians of both parties have proven to be such losers that they cannot even stem the tide of the state losing money and becoming increasingly a poverty stricken economic basketcase with limited opportunities for its citizens that they have to increasingly go to other states in order to work and live. Meanwhile the population of Kentucky still increases with now about 20 percent of the state being functionally illiterate at a time of widespread literacy and 90 percent high school graduation rates. Of course, we know that many people pass through school due to social promotion and authorities just having to cover their rear ends to justify keeping their jobs and glossing over those left behind.
Of course, the 120 fiefdoms that consist of the 120 counties of Kentucky have a large number of incompetent and often stupid public officials that shouldn't even be in government to begin with and only get in due to name recognition and family ties. Here's looking at you in making Kentucky and even shittier place to live than it already has been for several decades. Its a good thing that Kentucky residents don't travel a whole lot outside of their little bubble in most rural areas because if they actually got out and experienced much of the United States other than the South they would realize how badly they've been getting screwed over the years.
Imagine.........Louisville Is Basically Broke Again
https://www.wdrb.com/news/lmpd-officers-applying-elsewhere-amid-concerns-about-pension-pay-low/article_9a2c767c-370f-11ea-a610-db36353726e0.html
https://www.wdrb.com/news/louisville-s-nonprofits-in-battle-for-funding-as-city-s/article_ceda1c3a-33ea-11ea-ac09-f78a49657d01.html
This time it is going to have a serious effect on city services and the competence or must I say incompetence of city government is astounding that they have known for years that the city is on precarious financial straits even though the national economy is relatively strong and unemployment is low. It just shows the type of incompetent government that exists in Louisville, Kentucky and overall the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Not to mention that Louisville regularly ranks among its regional cities as being less than favorable when it comes to people making living wages and having quality jobs and incomes.
In fact, Louisville, Kentucky in a recent year ranked 18th out of 20 peer cities in the Midwestern and Southern United States when it came to various factors in the socioeconomic realm including personal income, family income, median income, quality of jobs, educational opportunities, educational achievement and much more. Behind regional cities such as Nashville, TN, Cincinnati, OH, Columbus, OH, Indianapolis, IN, Charlotte, NC, Kansas City and countless others. Even including the crime stricken community of St. Louis, MO which despite its crime problems in the North City and North County still came out far ahead of Louisville, Kentucky when it came to economic growth, unemployment and various income based statistics as well as educational achievement.
It's a quite pathetic indictment when a city like Louisville ranks far behind all of these other cities when it comes to job creation, economic growth and overall incomes. Then again, its the Louisville mentality and the mentality of the Commonwealth of Kentucky to be at the bottom of the barrel and refuse to do the work necessary to improve by attaining improved education, financial management and improving job quality and overall economic indicators. Louisville has long been a city that sits on its laurels and makes excuses from its business community and so called civic leadership.
After decades of making these excuses and continually allowing the infrastructure and quality of life in Louisville and surrounding areas to deteriorate, one would think that Louisville would have a major wake-up call and start addressing these things. Then again, its more of the Louisville mentality and things that wouldn't be allowed to fester elsewhere totally get ignored by the ignoramuses on the Louisville Metro Council and Louisville Metro Mayor's Office.
Now the police are starting to figure out what a mess that Louisville Metro financials are and with the morale problems by local government allying itself with more criminal elements of society and refusing to allow police to do their job the crime issues are starting to spiral upward while the crime issues such as murders and violent crimes and all other forms of criminal activity are being tolerated.
Increasingly, the Louisville Metro Police Department and its officers are having their hands tied by the Louisville Metro Government and Louisville Metro Council as well as the local right to know media and Metro Mayor Greg Fischer and his handpicked "yes man" Steve Conrad and his lieutenants padding their pensions while doing nothing about fixing Louisville's crime issues.
So accordingly the police are moving off to other jurisdictions either within Louisville/Jefferson County such as Anchorage or surrounding police departments in other counties near Louisville if not other states. All because the pay and working conditions is better in other locations than financially strapped Louisville. More on this in part Two.....Louisville is basically broke again.
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