......

[LuthierJustin]

What if you "forgot" to pay your car insurance and got into a wreck should you be able to call them up after your wreck and buy a policy covering your wrecked car?

[Smitty]

What if you "forgot" to pay your car insurance and got into a wreck should you be able to call them up after your wreck and buy a policy covering your wrecked car?

Of course not, but that's a completely different scenario, LJ - first off, this is a fire department we're talking about, a public service institution for preventing and extiniguishing fires, not an insurance company, and if fire/police depts started operating like an insurance company I believe we'd all be fucked. Ok, maybe not all, but the less fortunate anyway.
I guess I overestimated people's compassion for others.

[beantownbubba]

Good Samaritan laws vary considerably from state to state. Some offer pretty blanket coverage, some are more holes than blanket.

Many people try to w/hold some or all of their taxes to protest some use of the money or to decline to participate in some activity. It's a loser argument. No chance at all of winning on that one at the federal level and i'd be willing to bet it's pretty similar in most states/localities.

The facts of this case are pretty unique and limited. Very few people get to choose whether to have fire coverage or not. On the basic case, I gotta say i'm w/ LJ on this one - the homeowner could have paid, chose not to (or "forgot"), gambled and lost. I still have problems w/ the firefighters actually being there and doing nothing, but I'm not yet 100% convinced they should have acted even then.

If u really want to push this, imagine the opposite case: A homeowner who lives in or near a protected nature area chooses not to pay for fire coverage in circumstances similar to this one. A forest fire breaks out in the protected area and the firefighters want to hose down the home to prevent the spread of the fire. For whatever reason the homeowner doesn't want his house getting wet. Can he refuse the "service"?

[Smitty]

I'm not speaking about the legalities here; they did nothing wrong under Tennessee law.
I'm talking on a personal level - I think the right thing would've been put the fire out and maybe bill the shit outta him.

[wrekkr]

he didn't pay the $75, what makes you think he would have paid a "bill the shit out of him" bill?
i would highly doubt he
i'm saying he deserved to have his house burned down, i'm just not sure he really deserved to have it hosed down.
i don't think this are gona change for the better until irresponsibilty stops being rewarded.

[Smitty]

he didn't pay the $75, what makes you think he would have paid a "bill the shit out of him" bill?
i would highly doubt he
i'm saying he deserved to have his house burned down, i'm just not sure he really deserved to have it hosed down.
i don't think this are gona change for the better until irresponsibilty stops being rewarded.

I wouldn't say having the the fire burning your house put out is called "being rewarded".

I'm sorry, I think a fire truck filled with firemen watching a guy trying to put a fire out on his home with a water hose and refusing to help (regardless of the circumstances) is totally fucking wrong. I also don't see the logic in letting a multi-thousand dollar home burn because of a $75 fine. What if you had were in a life-threatening situation, say an intruder had you trapped in your home, and called 911, but before any aid could be given, the dispatcher would have to check to make sure you paid your taxes in order to receive their service? God forbid you (or even worse, the IRS) made a mistake when you filed, or else you'd be "unworthy" of the receiving the police dept's services.
Failure for a fire dept to save a persons home because of economics is wrong, I don't see any other way around it.
I don't think things are going to change for the better until we get rid of this "every man for himself" mindset and start realizing we're all in this together.

[Smitty]

At the very least, whoever gave the order not to extinguish the fire should face animal cruelty charges.
I'm kind of surprised at the lack of compassion on here; it was a fire department, not an insurance company, not some private business, but a FIRE DEPT - a community service, a public good - allowing a family to lose everything they own to insure that nobody else skimps on their fee is unexcusable to me, it's not as if the fire dept would go broke if nobody even paid the fee, or else there would be countless numbers of FD's shut down- the International Association of Firefighter's president issued a statement condemning the incident too...

Sorry this just really pisses me off - it just goes against everything I've ever been taught was right - it's inhumane and downright frightening to me -

The libertarian/private sector society works great if you're in or close to the wealthy/"fortunate" class, but if you're in the mid-to-low class, you're shit outta luck.

[Zip City]

yeah, but the conservative mantra is that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor.

in other words, fuck the poor

[The Black Canary]

yeah, but the conservative mantra is that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor.

in other words, fuck the poor

Unfortunately that isn't even a joke!!! it is so true. I love people who say "it's only money I can always make more" that really irritates me.

As though the working class is just amusement for the wealthy and sometimes, unfortunately that is exactly the way they behave!!!!

[Penny Lane]

yeah, but the conservative mantra is that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor.

in other words, fuck the poor

simplicity must be nice
i think most conservatives believe in having a safety net for the poor, they always have.
when you're safety net grows to overtake the amount of dollars coming in and the amount of people working slims down to a tiny percentage holding up that net..most conservatives grew up middle class, working class or working poor, so obviously they don't think 'fuck the poor' because they were most likely having to put water in their cereal at some point
most of the wealthiest in congress are liberal
how about if i said most liberals were extremely elite, overeducated people who pity most everyone not like them, therefore feel the need to throw money at the problem, making it worse and wasting tax dollars, or that the rest of liberals are comprised of minorities, immigrants, and the bottom money earners because they need handouts. (btw, i'm not SAYING this, but what if i was)..i think it's just as incorrect

99% of fire chiefs or firefighters would NOT have stood by and watched a house burn, just like most people would not stand by and watch a toddler run out into oncoming traffic, the point is that this guy (for whatever reason) didn't do what he was supposed to do, and having some policy to collect the money afterwards (like wrekkr mentioned) probably wouldn't be successful. this is an exception to how most people would act, liberal or conservative or what not.

[wrekkr]

if this guy was poor, he probably wouldn't have been able to afford a home in the first place. . . .

if he was poor, yet did own a home and couldn't afford the $75 then he was being financially irresponsible.

[Smitty]

yeah, but the conservative mantra is that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor.

in other words, fuck the poor

simplicity must be nice
i think most conservatives believe in having a safety net for the poor, they always have.
when you're safety net grows to overtake the amount of dollars coming in and the amount of people working slims down to a tiny percentage holding up that net..most conservatives grew up middle class, working class or working poor, so obviously they don't think 'fuck the poor' because they were most likely having to put water in their cereal at some point
most of the wealthiest in congress are liberal
how about if i said most liberals were extremely elite, overeducated people who pity most everyone not like them, therefore feel the need to throw money at the problem, making it worse and wasting tax dollars, or that the rest of liberals are comprised of minorities, immigrants, and the bottom money earners because they need handouts. (btw, i'm not SAYING this, but what if i was)..i think it's just as incorrect

You're probably right if you're talking about the average conservative citizen, the problem is they have a tendency to vote for "conservative" politicians whose policies do seem to scream "fuck the poor." The sad thing is, a huge part of their electorate are the same one's they're fucking - they're excellent propagandists. But it's not just the Republicans, it's most of the Democrats too. The last two politicians I've seen who seemed to genuinely care about the poor were John Edwards and Mike Huckabee.

[Cotter]

On the OTHER other hand, what if so many people claimed they could not afford the 75 bux and then the fire dept ran itself in the ground, thus losing protection for everyone?

I think that fire protection is considered a service, not necessarily a right....??

I dunno, I'm still in the camp that this guy is a soup can if he didn't pay it. If he had enough stuff that was worthy to protect, he should have sold something to make it up, hold a car wash, pick berries, spend his weekends panhandling or picking up loose change, pimp his wife, fake an accident at a Walmart....or perhaps be more diligent in his fire prevention....I dunno.

[Penny Lane]

the property was the only right (and even that could be relative)...
also a lot of those compassionate conservatives crossed over and put Obama in office (in states like Ohio and VA)..i get what you're saying though, Smitty.

[Zip City]

my statement was certainly a generalization, but one needs only look at the policy decisions/voting record of conservatives in Washington to see they don't give a rat's ass about the poor

[Slipkid42]

That anything like this can happen 250 years into the 'Greatest Country on Earth' is inexcusable for any reason. The 1/2 ass way that district collects their fire tax needs to be re-evaluated. Rescue service should not be negotiable. Take the necessary funds out of the local taxes that we already pay. The poor people that don't pay taxes have enough problems already, that they don't need the extra anxiety of worrying if the fire dept. is gonna save what little bit they have. It is the burden of the income earning people of this 'Great Country', to help the poor through their troubled lives (or figure out a way to make them more productive). That we the People feel the need to help every downtrodden nation on the face of this planet; while consistently turning our backs on our own, is extremely perplexing to me.

This particular case got me thinking about a plausible scenario. Say there's a fire in an unoccupied house. The Rescue for Hire Squad discovers it's a non-paying customer. They stand around listening to the Bloodhound Gang sing Burn Motherfucker Burn, and laugh at the neighbor's futile attempts to dowse the flames. They at least have the decency to spray the dying embers (so as to reduce the risk to other customers, who aren't in arrears). Uh oh, some signals got crossed and this poor schmoe (who was away for his mother's funeral) actually had ponied up the required 'luxury tax'. He's none too pleased when he discovers that every last memento of Mom has been incinerated, while the Fire Squad just watched. Wouldn't the ensuing lawsuit nullify hundreds of thousands of these $75 fees?

[Cotter]

Perhaps, just perhaps, this outlying community could think of doing what thousands of other outlying communities do. - volunteer fire dept.

If the response time is great enough from the city, there will be no home to rescue ANYWAY when the dept gets there.

Now, I, nor anyone here, has the chain of events or timeline to know how much of the home was engulfed. The notion for firemen and women to risk their lives to try and rescue pets that were most likely already succumbed to smoke inhalation (this guy fought the fire himself for a while with garden hoses, right?) is a bit ridiculous.

There are options available for this community, and obviously, the community had opted for the pre-pay option. This joker was hoping to save a few hundred bux over a couple years and I'm sure had calculated in his head every year he DIDN'T pay the fee that if someday, something happened, they would come out and risk their lives and equipment, for a no-pay soup can.

Also, what WOULD have happened had they responded and another PAYING citizen had a fire and they were now subject to a longer response time, thus causing additional damage to property of the paying owner?

The scenario's are endless, and all of this could have been avoided for the cost of 3 cases of Miller Lite.

[Penny Lane]

just for argument's sake though, assume the guy COULD pay it, the article says that the homeowner assumed they would put out the fire regardless of whether he paid it or not..meaning he weighed the alternatives and decided to risk it..at least that's how i took it.

[Cotter]

just for argument's sake though, assume the guy COULD pay it, the article says that the homeowner assumed they would put out the fire regardless of whether he paid it or not..meaning he weighed the alternatives and decided to risk it..at least that's how i took it.

Yep, but what would make him assume they would do it when I'm sure it was very clear in the literature he received that they would not.

My guess is soup-cannedness

LOL!

Have a great weekend everyone!

[LuthierJustin]

A wise man once said "I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."- Ben Franklin

[Smitty]

On the OTHER other hand, what if so many people claimed they could not afford the 75 bux and then the fire dept ran itself in the ground, thus losing protection for everyone?

I think that fire protection is considered a service, not necessarily a right....??

I dunno, I'm still in the camp that this guy is a soup can if he didn't pay it. If he had enough stuff that was worthy to protect, he should have sold something to make it up, hold a car wash, pick berries, spend his weekends panhandling or picking up loose change, pimp his wife, fake an accident at a Walmart....or perhaps be more diligent in his fire prevention....I dunno.

Call the guy a soup can or whatever term you can think of, but a $75 fine is not worth a multi-thousand dollar home, especially if they took the time to go the scene and sit back and watch.

And Cotter, I would bet that even if nobody paid the $75 fee the fire department would not go under - I know a little about fire dept funding/grants and it's not like it's difficult for a fire department to receive grants/funding, especially the past 10 years, although a lot of it was "porked" away, after 9/11 Bush did allot a ton of available funds for public services like fire/police depts under the homeland security funding, and in Obama's stimulus bill there was over 200 mil going to fire & wildlife services, so to say that they would go broke even if nobody outside the city limits paid the fine is outrageous.

I completely agree with the assertion that they should create themselves a volunteer fire dept, though.

[Smitty]

A wise man once said "I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."- Ben Franklin

In a perfect world that would make sense, but this ain't a perfect world. This is a world where the most impoverished kids have shitty schools, where there's 1 job to every five people, I could go on and on but I don't see it changing anybody's mind so it's kinda pointless.

[Slipkid42]

Our poor people might be better off being deported to some other country, so we can actually feel sorry for them.

I live in a rural county in Maryland. I don't know by what magical source my fire dept. is funded. I assume it is in grants, which ultimately come from taxes. The sparsely populated towns throughout my county, have fire depts. that are manned by volunteers. Routinely 3-4, companies respond to blazes as far as 30 miles away. I've never heard of any Fire Dept. lacking for volunteers (or not trying to extinguish the blaze). I don't know what set of circumstances could exist in Tennessee, that would prevent them from following this successful model.

I don't view fire rescue as a service anymore than I look at police protection as such. These fundamental needs are what our tax dollars should be paying for. Roads, schools, hospitals, law enforcement and firehouses should be every Americans inalienable right. If there's any money left over, then build your missiles and tanks. Stop outsourcing everything to everybody, and stop letting everybody in to take what few jobs we have left. We are so focused on dealing with the threat of terror, that we are overlooking the fungus among us. That is our own disregard for each other. Anarchy can't be far behind.

When firemen can stand and watch a house burn to the ground, something needs fixing.

[beantownbubba]

Let's focus on the facts here. They matter. The city in question has a funded fire dept. If i understand the situation correctly, its budget is funded by city taxes and whatever state and federal funds it's entitled to or can rustle up. I'm willing to bet that the $75 fee is irrelevant to the survival and functioning of the fire dept - any revenue from the rural fee payers is on top of the revenue the city uses to run the dept. I assume that city residents simply call 911 or pull a fire box handle (do they still have those things?) and voila, the fire dept comes rushing over to meet their emergency.

The outlying rural area doesn't have a funded fire dept. Presumably whatever govt has jurisdiction (county, maybe?, direct "town meeting" w/out elected reps?) got together and analyzed the situation something like this: we can "buy" a professional full time fire dept, we can form a volunteer fire dept or we can buy the service from our friendly city next door, which they are happy to provide for a price. I have no idea what factors went into the decision, but we can assume it was some combination of sparse population over a wide area probably w/ low average incomes.

The plan they decided upon was for individual homeowners to buy their own protection at their discretion. We don't know why they decided that, but they did.

The net result is that, in effect, people who don't pay the fee are outside the jurisdiction of the city fire dept. Absent a mind boggling emergency, NYC fire trucks don't race to fires in Nassau County or NJ, either. Put the other way, people who do pay the fee create a special and limited extension of the fire dept's jurisdiction.

So, to me, the argument about whether the fire dept should answer the call of a non-payer from outside their jurisdiction is easy: No. BUT that's not the issue here because the fire dept had already been called out and was standing around watching the fire burn. I vacillated on this for a while, but i have to say that in retrospect it's an easy decision: The fire dept absolutely should have fought the fire once they were already there. There's no moral or economic counter that I can see which carries enough weight to overcome the moral, ethical and professional arguments in favor of responding. I especially don't see the economic argument because of the unusual (unique?) circumstances - the fire dept will exist and be funded w/out regard to whether any rural homeowners pay a fee.

[Smitty]

Our poor people might be better off being deported to some other country, so we can actually feel sorry for them.

I live in a rural county in Maryland. I don't know by what magical source my fire dept. is funded. I assume it is in grants, which ultimately come from taxes. The sparsely populated towns throughout my county, have fire depts. that are manned by volunteers. Routinely 3-4, companies respond to blazes as far as 30 miles away. I've never heard of any Fire Dept. lacking for volunteers (or not trying to extinguish the blaze). I don't know what set of circumstances could exist in Tennessee, that would prevent them from following this successful model.

I don't view fire rescue as a service anymore than I look at police protection as such. These fundamental needs are what our tax dollars should be paying for. Roads, schools, hospitals, law enforcement and firehouses should be every Americans inalienable right. If there's any money left over, then build your missiles and tanks. Stop outsourcing everything to everybody, and stop letting everybody in to take what few jobs we have left. We are so focused on dealing with the threat of terror, that we are overlooking the fungus among us. That is our own disregard for each other. Anarchy can't be far behind.

When firemen can stand and watch a house burn to the ground, something needs fixing.

I'm behind everything you said, Slip - I would've guessed more people on here would have felt the same way, but I guess I was wrong. This shit has been on my mind for a couple days now - I can't think of any reason to say a man deserves to have his house burnt down, and even if he deserves it for not paying the fee, do his kids deserve to lose their home because of $75? I don't even know if he has kids, but if so I don't think this would be the way to teach them a lesson in irresponsibility.
It's just fucking heartless.

Now, I, nor anyone here, has the chain of events or timeline to know how much of the home was engulfed. The notion for firemen and women to risk their lives to try and rescue pets that were most likely already succumbed to smoke inhalation (this guy fought the fire himself for a while with garden hoses, right?) is a bit ridiculous.
.

I didn't say shit about them risking their lives for the pets, but they didn't attempt at all to stop the blaze.

I dug a little deeper, and the Obion County Commission (who are 100% Republican) voted down a resolution to establish a county-wide fire department last December, in favor of their "fee-based" service. If I lived in that county and had to pay the fee, I'd demand that every cent collected from the public to pay for the fire dept was accounted for, cuz it all sounds a little extortionish to me.

[beantownbubba]

Smitty, the missing piece there is that the county commissioners chose not to raise taxes to pay for a fire dept. There are 2 reasons (besides just being cheap or mean) to make that decision: You don't think the risk is worth the cost (or more realistically, u don't think the people who vote think the risk is worth the cost) or the service can be bought more cost effectively elsewhere. If you are a resident of that county and think there ought to be a county fire dept, then presumably you'd pay the $75, because you're apparently willing to be taxed more than that to have your own county fire dept. If OTOH u don't think there ought to be a county dept, you then get to make your own decision w/ your own money w/out it impacting anyone else. Again this is an extremely unusual situation where those factors come together in that way.

If you think there ought to be a county fire dept but are unwilling to have your taxes raised to pay for it, well, welcome to America circa 2010 (i.e. a non functioning situation). The feds can sort of get away w/ that because they print the money but localities can't. At the local level u either have to put up or shut up. Municipalities all over the country are cutting back on things that would have been unheard of 20 yrs ago: everything from schools to libraries to police and fire protection to school sports. The fact is, if you're not willing to pay for local services you're not gonna get them, whether you're rural and poor or suburban and rich.

[Smitty]

I don't know the reason that they decided against a county-wide department, but appartently there was only going to be a .13 % raise in taxes - it doesn't make sense to me. I think that gets at the root of a fundamental problem this country is having (or so it seems to me) - that the raising of taxes under any circumstances is an evil, terrible thing and an infringement on our liberty.

i would like ot elaborate but I have a 16 month old hollerin Da Da wanting attention

[Slipkid42]

bubba - When the disparity in the quality of life between the haves and the have-nots grows large, the have-nots usually try to level the playing field. When a government of these people allows the disparity to widen,(in fact even promotes it) that government is usually replaced (often by force). History has many examples of this.
This type of moral decay is sloughed off in the guise of bogus righteousness. "He shoulda paid the fee, he got what was comin' to him" The truth is, neither he, nor the podunk county he lives in should've had it come to this. We pay a lot of taxes, and what that money gets spent on is what needs to be adjusted. We worry so much about protecting the world from itself, that we don't have enough left to protect ourselves. Our priorities need a major overhaul. We need to get back to the high ideals set forth by our founding fathers (who apparently were far more far-sighted than most people born 250 years later). However, a capitalistic society can probably not co-exist with the premise that all men are created equal. Greed has a way of making things less equal. That ultimately will be the fatal flaw in what was otherwise a beautiful plan. The American Dream lasted up until about 25-30 years ago, and crested to the point where we were the greatest country this world has ever known. Our undoing began when politicians started voting along party lines and not with their hearts (or for the needs of the constituents that voted them into office). Well meaning representatives (who occasionally did the right thing) were not given the support of the party machine. They learned to toe the line. We over-defend our selves because neither party wants to look weak. We somehow now believe that liberal is a dirty word (when it used to mean open-minded). We view most unfortunate souls as someone who is too lazy or irresponsible to get a job and support his family. The reality is we have allowed our manufacturing to disappear (trying to get cheaper prices). We have let generations of immigrants live here and undercut previously hard working people by providing their services for cheaper wages. We've allowed the mega-stores to swallow up the enterprising Moms & Pops of yesteryear. Now days those Moms & Pops are proletariat Wal-Mart greeters. The ambition and drive that we used to have as individuals is now only realized at the corporate level. Poor people can't afford the education necessary to rise up the corporate ladder. At some point they will have no recourse but to fight for their piece of the pie History will repeat itself, it's just a matter of when.

This article reminds me of the opening chapter of some Stephen King story. I know most folks consider him a hack writer, but I don't. The detail he instills in his characters, to me is so true to life. His tales run the gamut: from the mundane to the highly implausible. This quirk of society is an isolated incident. The next thing you know hundreds of other commissioners in other bumfuck jurisdictions decide that they can trim their budgets thusly. Soon after, houses are burning to the ground left & right. Whether it was negligence or inability to pay the fee will matter little. Even ramshackle huts are Home Sweet Home to someone. I can even hear their battle cry: Fight Fire With Fire. The scorching of America will officially begin. Jeez, I think I need to get back to the happy thread.

[wrekkr]

If the response time is great enough from the city, there will be no home to rescue ANYWAY when the dept gets there.

this could very well be the reason they didn't hose his house down . . . it was too far gone by the time they got there to even bother.

[Smitty]

If the response time is great enough from the city, there will be no home to rescue ANYWAY when the dept gets there.

this could very well be the reason they didn't hose his house down . . . it was too far gone by the time they got there to even bother.

If that was the case, they sure should've saved face if they'd just have come out and said that.