Town needs 'lifetime' to pay restaurant tab

[j.m@talk]

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese officials ran up a bill at a rural restaurant so large it will take the cash-strapped local government 36 years to pay it off, the Beijing Evening News reported Monday.

Over four years of frequenting the restaurant in northern Shaanxi province, local officials had paid only a tenth of their 200,000 yuan ($24,000) total tab, the paper said.

"The town government can only pay 5,000 yuan a year and they owe 180,000 yuan, so it will take 36 years to pay back -- that's a lifetime," Wei Zhongqin, the owner of the now bankrupt restaurant, was quoted as saying.

It is common for a rural town in China to be flat broke.

The paper did not say why Wei had let the customers run up such a large bill or why the town was expected to pay for them.

http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/nws/p/reuters120.gif

[ukulele]

We have the same problem in America. Every defense contractor in the country is feeding at the trough and half the money they spend is spent on lawyers trying to figure out a way to avoid paying taxes.

Somewhere along the money trail you will find the owner of the restaurant and the local government have a sweetheart deal and the cost to the restaurant owner is passed on to the paying customers.

[zybch]

Its the same the world over, and yet our elected officials are quite content to just ignore it. Perhaps because if there was any official; investigation they'd all be implicated. So its just ignored and allowed to continue.