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The Spectacle Blog
Walter Russell Mead has a way of putting big problems into perspective. Here he is on American cities:
After the Medicare/Medicaid catastrophe the single greatest policy failure of modern America is urban policy. Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods. The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more. And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before. There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched. Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll. Forty percent of all pregnancies in New York end in abortion, with higher rates among Blacks; nationally, the rate among Blacks is three times the rate among white women. Put it all together and you have a holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match.
This is not a lot to show for almost fifty years of fighting poverty - not a lot of bang for the buck.
We need to do better. The state of the American inner city is an unacceptable human tragedy, and the costs in money spent and prosperity forfeited create an unsustainable drag on the national economy at a time when we need all the help we can get.
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More Blog Posts by Joseph Lawler
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/07/05/the-great-societys-urban-failu
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Michael L. Hauschild| 7.5.11 @ 1:15PM
Most people have no idea how bad this really is. There were times as a geographer I was not even allowed to comment on this phenomenon. Objectivity – absolutely not, PC – absolutely; the tipping point occurred long ago.
bop berrigan| 7.6.11 @ 7:08AM
You're wrong if you think people don't know the effect of transferring trillions of $$ from the productive to the nonproductive. Take a trip through the smaller cities and villages in upstate New York and you'll see the effects of LBJ's misplaced use of taxpayer $$$. The desolation is widespread.
Oldefarte| 7.5.11 @ 1:32PM
As Joseph rightfully indicates, Johnson's GREAT SOCIETY welfare was a bondoogle of massive financial proportions [and the sad fact that many are ignorantly unaware of is that the federal government dollars are still/continually funding these programs year-after-year]. These programs were a terrible liberal idea to begin with, never worked and never will work. They are simply pouring taxpayer money down a rathole. The problems with the inner-cities are sourced in lack of quality public education and [as stated] unwanted births. The government should be forced to de-unionize public education and to incentivise quality teachers to produce educated graduates [along with forcing student acedemic participation and demanding their excellence and dedication to learning]; and to mandate/force birth control [through excessive dispensing of birth control devices and denying welfare governmental payments accordingly]. When these youths can become truly educated and capable of income producing employment [while not being imprisoned from unwanted pregnancies/births], then they will have a fighting/competing chance in life for their betterment!!!!!!
Prester John| 7.5.11 @ 1:46PM
You want proof of failure--just look at Drudge right now:
Milwaukee
Chicago
Boston
Mobile
Atlantic City
Baltimore
And that's just from the weekend.
wodiej| 7.5.11 @ 3:17PM
I just heard HUD wants to give billions more to help homeowners. We all know which segment of society they represent and they are not helping them by giving them handouts.
Chuck| 7.5.11 @ 4:28PM
The GOP when in power either the WH or Congress or both hasn't done anything to diminish the Great Society just like the generation before it didn't do anything to diminish the New Deal. Do you think a President Romney will do anything to diminish anything the current President has implemented? Fat chance, Obamacare will become a fabric of American society with Romney joyfully saying we republicans can manage it better.
PCP Smoker| 7.5.11 @ 8:28PM
"The state of the American inner city is an unacceptable human tragedy, and the costs in money spent and prosperity forfeited create an unsustainable drag on the national economy at a time when we need all the help we can get."
Let's not get carried away with moralistic crusades. Those aces in the ghetto will bash your head in at a moment's notice, film it, and upload it to utube. Keep the abortion mills going. The last thing we need is more ghetto people
Bob Grant| 7.5.11 @ 9:03PM
The section 8 program is a massive handout to ghetto moms with children. The more you have, the bigger voucher.
Believe it or not these vouchers can be in excess of $1,500 a month. That's FIFTEEN HUNDRED X several hundred thousand, if not million.
In addition to their vouchers, they receive around FIVE HUNDRED dollars a month, per child, to cover food costs, PLUS, another handout to cover miscellaneous expenses.
Oh, and lets not forget the CHIPS and medicaid programs.
Folks, you're talking as much a $4,5000 to $5,000 dollars a month in government largess and unsustainable.
For 18 years per child!!!
uncle curmudgeon| 7.6.11 @ 8:37AM
The real beneficiaries of this monstrosity are the local bureaucrats and there private sector cronies in the "affordability" rackets. The poor slobs living on welfare lead terrible lives, held there as cannon fodder by the "caring" class. Community organizers round them up whenever they need a mob or, of course, on election day, when its time to pull the old motor-voter-fraud trick. Amazingly, the Party of Stupid never gets around to defunding these creeps. November, 2012: she's just around the bend!