Planning a Trip to Golden Gate Park?

by Jack

( Picture on left is a clue what what you need to bring to see the Academy of Sciences)

Lets say you have a family of three, Mom, Dad and Junior and you want to take a little day trip to San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.  This is a heavily subsidized state park, so you might expect that after all the fees and taxes you pay every year that the good ol’ state of California might give you a deal on the ticket price when you go to see our people’s museum, right? Well, if that’s what you thought, then you would be disappointed. Admission is $35 per adult! $25 for a child! If you go to the planetarium that’s extra. And if you stop in at the museum’s cafeteria for lunch, you will be lucky to get out the door for less than $50. Now add up bridge tolls, mileage cost and it all totals up to somewhere around $220 bucks for your day trip.

If you are in the middle income and under range it’s safe to say that there are very few families that can afford this educational visit. And what about those of us in retirement and living on social security? Well Bunky, chances are you’re not going, because you can’t afford it. Given their pricey food menu and pricier tickets, you might think this “public” park was made strictly for the pleasure of the rich folks.   Isn’t it ironic that our elite liberals in Sacramento  and San Francisco would do that to the blue collar folks and the impoverished elderly that usually vote democrat?

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16 Responses to Planning a Trip to Golden Gate Park?

  1. Libby says:

    Does the phrase “Prop 13” ring a bell, you damnable doofus !?

    It’s been $100 for a family of four for 30 years !!! And now it’s $120?

    Surprise, surprise.

    Just … go away.

    • Joe says:

      He said $220. Can’t you read?

      So Captain Jack is supposed to go away from his own blog?

      That’s rich. You barge into this place and tell the proprietor to go away after calling him damnable and a doofus.

    • Pie Guevara says:

      Too funny! Libby blames Proposition 13 for how progressive nitwits in San Francisco run (er, ruin) that city and then tells Jack to leave his own blog! To paraphrase Gertrude Stein —

      A troll is a troll is a troll
      or
      An ass is an ass is an ass
      or
      A clown is a clown is a clown

      But Libby is all three …
      A troll is an ass is a clown

    • Pie Guevara says:

      Speaking of Proposition 13, how is it that this bill has never been repealed by the progressive scum who own and run this state lock, stock and barrel? Eh Libby? Perhaps the troll who is an ass who is a clown who is a paradigm of progressive scum can shed some light.

  2. Tina says:

    Jack it’s a sad state of affairs. Same goes for sports, Disneyland or even the the movies.

    When prop 13 became law with nearly 2/3rds of the vote we were relieved. If it hadn’t passed our property tax bill was set to overcome our house payment. We were going to have to sell our house. A lot of people all over California already had:

    Those who have owned their homes for a while, easily see the value of Proposition 13. Many of us remember that before Proposition 13 the average property tax rate in California was three percent of assessed value and there was no limit on annual increases.

    In those days, if a house on your block sold for much more than you paid for your house, you shuddered in fear when you received your next property tax bill. Chances are, your new taxes would be based on what your new neighbor was willing to pay for his home. Things got so bad in the late 1970s that people were actually losing their homes because of uncontrolled tax increases.

    Thanks to Howard Jarvis, Paul Gann and Proposition 13, the assessment rate is now only one percent for all California property and annual tax increases are limited to no more than two percent. When property is sold it is then reassessed at market value, but the rate remains at one percent and the new owner is then protected by the two percent cap on annual increases.

    Can you imagine what property taxes would be like today, on top of our state tax and sales tax were it not for prop 13? If you’re not sure think about the state pension fund that’s a bust. And before you scoff at what I’m saying consider this Forbes article from January last year:

    How’s your 401(k) doing? If you have stocks in it, not well.

    How are government pensioners doing? Fabulously well, some of them. A database of pensions maintained by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscal watchdog in Albany, shows firefighters retiring on up to $284,000 a year.

    How are taxpayers faring? Badly. A survey published Jan. 15 by Moody’s says that state pension funds are $1.3 trillion underwater, a number up slightly from the year before. The bond raters don’t have a complete picture of municipal pensions, but they do have a 2013 total for 50 large cities: $435 billion missing from the till.

    The scary thing about the Moody’s state report is that its numbers are for the 2014 fiscal year, meaning a valuation date of June 30, 2014 for most states. Over the preceding 12 months, pension portfolios averaged a 16% return. You’d expect that with such gains the deficit would shrink. It didn’t. Rising obligations swamped that bull market.

    Governments don’t spend our money well and they certainly don’t spend it to benefit the average private sector worker or business owner. California is one of the worst. The situation with Oroville Dam is a great example, especially when you consider “Jerry’s Folly,” that costly widdle twain to nowheya soon:

    The bullet train idea was floated on a blustery gust of political promises in 2008, when proponents put the high-speed rail to the state’s voters in the form of a $10 billion bond issue to pay for its initial costs.

    With hard-hit voters then suffering from the worst of the financial crisis, they fell for pledges of high-paying jobs and an ultrafast, low-cost train that would speed passengers from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles in a mere two hours and 40 minutes.

    The proposal passed. But as the scale of deception behind the project has become known, it has been hit by a series of legal and environmental challenges. Even so, California has already committed to spending more than the $10 billion bond amount, and taxpayers are on the hook. It’s a runaway train.

    Worse, since the bond issue passed in 2008, cost estimates have only soared. Initially budgeted at $32 billion, the price tag is now put at twice that: $68 billion or more. Even the initial stretch of track, which lies on the flattest, easiest-to-build part of the entire total 700-mile route, has seen its cost soar 50%, from $6.4 billion to $10 billion.

    Moreover, that initial part of the much bigger project was originally slated to be completed this year. But so far, not a mile has been laid. Nothing. According to a recent confidential report by the Federal Railroad Administration, the first part of the rail system is at least seven years behind schedule.

    And the final stage may require the boring of 36 miles of tunnels through the earthquake-prone mountains that surround Los Angeles — a massively costly undertaking that will add billions more to the costs and delay even further its completion.

    The official estimates call for 18 million to 31 million riders a year after the rail is finished. But just 11 million or so people now fly between the five airports in Los Angeles and Orange County to San Francisco each year, making the estimates highly dubious.

    Delusional citizens like Libby support this type of elitist government spending. She’s delusional enough to think that higher property taxes would pay for computers, band and art classes at our K-12 schools and keep tuition low at our state colleges…what a dope!

    A lot of things have contributed to the situation we’re in. What frustrates me is how many people, like Libby, never consider the scale to which our governments contribute. They take our money and waste it, they write regulations that drive prices up and cost us jobs, and they pay themselves at elitist rates that rival upper management in the corporate world.

    And the people keep electing the same lousy money managers over and over again.

    • Dewster says:

      Social security is an entitlement and you want to end it right?

      You support working people being poor. The costs to produce things ha gone up, our incomes have gone down comparatively.

      So do the conservative thang,………………………………………………….. go get more jobs and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Stop complaining because this is hypocrisy.

  3. Joe says:

    Too rich for my blood but even if it were not I would not go.

    I am boycotting that commie haven so I never plan to step foot in Crisco.

    • Dewster says:

      I guess the internet is a commie haven activity too. You might start by boycotting the internet and those google commies in SF.

      LOL you guys are back in the last century…..

  4. Libby says:

    You are all, as usual, missing the point. When I was a child, the zoo, and the de Young, and the aquarium were all funded by tax dollars, and admission was free. It was YOUR Reagonomic decision to abandon a civil society.

    So, should you DARE to snivel about the consequences, you is getting your keister, verbally, kicked right round the block.

    • Post Scripts says:

      The park fees were levied long after Reagan was governor, but the major price hikes came almost exactly when the democrats took control of the State of California. The $7 fee to enter the arboretum did not begin until 2011, guess who controlled the state from top to bottom in 2011? Hint: It was not the GOP. Liberals had hoped this would produce an income of over $650,000 a year, but guess what? The income fell woefully short to only $117,000 because visitors didn’t want to fork out the ticket price after being priced gouged at the DeYoung and the Academy of Sciences, it was just too much. Libs you can try to hang this on the GOP but in fact the blame goes squarely on your bunch of uppity liberals. Once again you’ve taken out your madness on the poor people. Nice going.

    • Tina says:

      The history of the SF fine arts museums, including de Young museum, suggests otherwise:

      Unlike most other major art museums, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco do not have a large endowment on which it can draw. As of June 2011, the endowment amounted to $120 million. The museums operate on an annual budget of about $55 million, most of which is funded by membership dues, ticket sales, donations and purchases in its stores[1] as well as contributed revenue (from philanthropic contributions and grants). They are run in a private-public partnership with the city of San Francisco, which owns the two museum buildings and covers about 23 percent of their operating expenses in the form of security guards and insurance premiums. In fiscal year 2012, the museum drew nearly 1.6 million visitors.[2]

      While they do receive some (undefined) grant monies, the bulk of their revenue generates from contributions, memberships, store purchases and ticket sales. Apparently they’ve done well enough to create a new state of the art facility which opened in 2005. (the state is apparently not involved; this is a SF thang)

      Geez Libby, is it possible for you to imagine anything other than tax and spend solutions?

      I shudder to think what America would look like had we begun in your mind.

      Like any such endeavor this museum requires funding (profits) to keep the doors open. Anyone who expects it to be “free” is a public mooch who doesn’t even want to pay when she benefits. (See liberals always want someone else to pay)

      In the early days of this country when taxes were much lower and regulations less costly and punishing, people who were blessed with abundance through hard work used their money to do good in the community. They built or helped to build beautiful museums, opera houses, hospitals, libraries and colleges and then often created an endowment for the upkeep.

      Now of course there is less incentive to contribute back since the big government socialists have decided they know better how to disperse property (profit) that doesn’t belong to them through a big politicized bureaucracy and heavy taxation.

      Stoopid!

  5. Libby says:

    “Reaganomic” is an adjective, and you know perfectly well what it means. Prop 13 went through in the seventies between Ronald’s Governorship and Presidency, and he gets full credit for the con job he did on the citizenry. Our poor little state has been slowly starving to death ever since.

    “User fees over taxes” is thoroughly Reaganomic, totally Republican, and you can just suffer the consequences quietly … or … face down a ferocious torrent of abuse.

  6. Libby says:

    And I’m right, … right!? … RIGHT !

  7. Libby says:

    Like when two generations of children who did not spend their weekends at the aquarium … rise up and burn your house down !

    And you know it’s coming … your fear is, after all, well grounded.

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