Welcome to Obama's New Dark Age

Colorado Springs, Colorado, pop. 400,000, has switched off one-third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while auctioning off all its police helicopters and reducing its police force from 687 two years ago, to 643 and dropping, the NY Times reported Saturday. The department estimates that there is a 23% chance that all units will be busy at any given time. It has reduced the number of detectives who investigate property crimes, cut the number of officers assigned to schools, and eliminated units that tracked juvenile offenders and caught fugitives. Officers no longer respond to the scene of most burglaries, at least if they are not in progress.

Cities from Fitchburg, Mass., to Santa Rosa, Calif., have been turning off streetlights likewise.

Clayton County, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, completely shut down its public transit system as of midnight, March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders, of whom two-thirds don't own a car. Many were unable to reach their workplaces and lost their jobs. Some left the county to try to start over elsewhere.

Meanwhile, paved country roads, "historical emblems of American achievement," are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces, as counties give up on finding the money to maintain them. "In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years," the Wall Street Journal reported July 17. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun degrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as "poor man's pavement." Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

At Purdue University, in Indiana, Prof. John Habermann organized a recent seminar about gravel roads titled, "Back to the Stone Age."