Posted on 08/05/2012 7:18:07 AM PDT by KeyLargo
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com
Burn Down the Suburbs? By Stanley Kurtz August 1, 2012 4:00 A.M.
Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC.
President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.
Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
How about the government get the hell out of the way and let people live where they want?
Some people like living in greater density, some do not, some in the middle.
I don’t want the goverment to “depopulate” anything. I want the government to leave people alone.
Obama's Presidential legacy will be that he enslaved the white devil.
Cities create broken, stressed dependent citizens. Citizens who become criminal, drug addicted, and frightened of losing their 'benefits' - the kind democrats control. The kind who vote for democrats... Great post, Key.
I do too but one of their jobs is commissioning more roads and bridges be built and maintained so the population can maintain a healthy living density. This is the expanding root system that helps the economy grow. City people tend to be physically stunted from living in a root bound environment. I went to a job interview on Wall Street and I towered over everybody, all the way up to the company president. People that live their whole lives in a city are visibly stunted as well as unhappy and neurotic. Humans don't do well living like insects.
Big cities: run away. I did and I’ve never been happier.
True, there’s no light/high speed rail in my backyard and I don’t have immediate access to the ballet, the opera the theater and national sports teams.
When the rubber meets the road, none of that will mean a thing anyway.
The article -- really a synopsis by the author of his book -- isn't silly in the least.
The era of easy annexation is, for the most part, over. Though laws vary by state, it is generally impossible for a city to involuntarily annex another incorporated community. Suburbanites have lately been wise enough to read the handwriting on the walls, and have incorporated areas which would have been in the path of annexation a few decades ago. Many cities are now "landlocked," with no way to expand their borders. As the whole metro area grows, more and more of the high income areas, in addition to retail malls and office parks -- all high tax revenue sources -- are being built outside the city limits. And the city gets poorer, and tax revenues decline, as the middle and upper classes flee to the suburbs.
A primary thesis of Kurtz's book is that the Obama Administration will seek to destroy the "protection" provided by the incorporation of suburban towns. They may, for instance, seek to permit or encourage "tax overlay" districts, based on a referendum of the entire metro area. So, if such a tax referendum passed by a large enough margin in the center city to offset its defeat in the suburbs (a likely outcome, as it would amount to a wealth transfer from the burbs to the city), the tax, and whatever urban-oriented projects it funded (streetcars, for example) would be implemented. Similarly, the Administration may seek to combine urban and suburban school districts, by bringing legal action (hello, Holder) to make a metro-wide vote on the question binding. Again, a likely outcome: the combined system would get overwhelming support within the center city (why wouldn't it?), likely enough to overwhelm the "no" vote of the suburbs.
Local government sovereignty is very much in danger. Anyone who can't see that is being, well, silly.
Here is a review of the book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Ron Radosh of PJMedia.
This is racially targeted harm. Obama, Holder and “his people” (Black liberals) are active racists. At the center of Marxist ideology is hatred of whites in the middle class.
What has gone of for over 40 years is cities expanding by incorporating unincoroporated areas. They did this to increase their tax base.
Existing city residents paid for the exapnsion infrastructure (and often enticement so developers) for these new areas. Once people moved into the new areas, these new taxpayers were tapped to pay for the next new expansion and its infrastructure costs ... and so on and so on.
This is how suburbs were created and why we have multiple rings of suburbs around central cities.
Here’s another. Democrats taking the blame from FReepers but no body bothered to read the story. The republicans are the ones who want to drain the Hetch Hetchy reservoir.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2914934/posts
Are you saying it the Federal government’s job to commission more roads and bridges so the population can maintain a healthy living density?
If so, I don’t agree. That’s not the Federal government’s job.
“Greenways and preserves drive up housing costs by reducing supply.”
Lack of Greenways and preserves drive housing prices down, by making the crowded, closed neighborhoods less desirable.
What is truly at issue here, are California municipalities that are allowing NO further development, beyond current borders.
That is MUCH different than establishing a “greenway or preserve”.
And that's why republicans who are NOT conservative are so dangerous. People just assume they're on "our" side and let them do whatever they want. Progressive republicans get away with a lot and it looks like that's going to continue.
Most of us are ok with that kind of government spending.
As of 2010, about one-quarter of all vehicle miles driven in the country use the Interstate system. The cost of construction has been estimated at $425 billion (in 2006 dollars), making it the "largest public works program since the Pyramids." The system has contributed in shaping the United States into a world economic superpower and a highly industrialized nation.
“People think Oboma is stupid, or he inherited this mess, or “he’s trying” , but this is exactly what he’s deliberately trying to do. Destroy middle class America. The middle class is the enemy.”
Exactly.
I am tired of Republicans and so-called conservative talk-show hosts preaching that Obama is really a “nice guy” and, well “Obama just does not understand economics”.
BULL CRAP!, BULL SH_T! and a CROCK OF SH_T!
Damm it, we know that Obama is a Marxist / Socialist and all of he does to destroy us is by design.
Obama Wants To Move The ‘Hood Into Your Neighborhood
October 27, 2011
By Policy Issues Institute 8 Comments
inShare
section 8 housing Obama Wants to Move the ‘Hood into Your Neighborhood
As part of its endless quest to fundamentally transform the United States, the Obama administration is laying the intellectual groundwork for a massive new government program: moving crime-prone tenants of public housing into middle- and upper middle-class neighborhoods in the name of improving their health.
Last Thursday, the New England Journal of Medicine published a multi-year study conducted on behalf of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) researching the impact of “housing mobility” on the health of those in public housing. The project, which tracked 4,500 “very low-income” families, found that allowing the poor to move from the projects to “low-poverty neighborhoods” decreased the incidence of both disorders and improved the families’ overall health.
Upon hearing the results, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan lamented, “Far too often we can predict a family’s overall health, even their life expectancy, by knowing their zip code.” Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) chimed in, “where you live can be critical to your health.”
For an administration obsessed with Nanny State health initiatives, increased welfare spending, and waging war on the affluent, the next step is not hard to anticipate. President Obama has already requested $28.6 billion for Section 8 housing vouchers in Fiscal Year 2012, fully 60 percent of HUD’s budget...
http://www.westernjournalism.com/obama-wants-to-move-the-hood-into-your-neighborhood/
Most people might be OK with it, but it’s not the Federal government’s job ... especially as you said “so the population can maintain a healthy living density”.
That sounds very much like collectivism to me ... for the greater good sort of thing.
Conservatives fall into that trap too.
“Target” the suburbs, and, next thing you know, the whites will flee from them, as well.
Insofar as some hopeless cities are concerned, that is already happening (or has happened already).
I’ve noticed lately how on the news I’ve heard them refer to places like Joliet and Dekalb like they’re part of the Chicago Metro area. These places are pretty far out and away.
Cook County, City of Chicago join forces to find ways to share services, cut costs
President Preckwinkle and Mayor Emanuel Announce City-County Merger in Workforce Development
A public health merger in Chicago?
Experts say city, Cook County could save money, improve services by combining health departments
May 12, 2011|By Judith Graham, Tribune reporter
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