> firefighters are a problem now? To some extent, yes. The number of fires that need responding to is down significantly (almost 2x over the last 3 decades).

> firefighters are a problem now? To some extent, yes. The number of fires that need responding to is down significantly (almost 2x over the last 3 decades). Over the same time, number of firefighters is _not_ down significantly; in fact it's up by a factor of 1.4 or so. So now they're partially a solution looking for a problem (e.g. doing medical emergency first response using fire trucks, which is just daft). http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/firefighters-dont-fight-fires.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/fir... has some graphs, links to data, etc that you may want to look at. This is not even entirely a US-specific problem; Toronto is having similar issues; see http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/08/06/toronto_paramedics_and_firefighters_at_odds_over_medical_calls.html http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/08/06/toronto_paramedic...