By John F. Di Leo -
The President referred to Baltimore, MD as "a hellhole," and the nation erupted in anger.
Within hours, snowflakes whined that it was hurtful, offensive, insulting, and unpresidential.
Within days, people started talking about the facts, though, and the President was redeemed. The many statistics on crime, unemployment, poverty, and urban blight prove that, by any objective standard, Baltimore is indeed a hellhole.
The proper political question isn’t what to do about a politician’s statement; the proper question is what to do about the facts?
Baltimore isn’t unusual.
We should begin by acknowledging another truth; whatever can be said about Baltimore can also be said about most other big cities in the United States. The differences, for the most part, are just a matter of degree.
I myself was born in a very similar city: Chicago, Illinois (though my parents moved us out to the suburbs as fast as they could).
Like Baltimore, Chicago has wealthy neighborhoods, a beautiful shoreline, great restaurants, quality theatre, museums and art galleries. The same could be said of Cleveland, Milwaukee, Houston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and so many other cities from coast to coast.
Unfortunately, in addition to these good points, all these cities also have urban blight – whole sections of condemned buildings, unlivable neighborhoods, areas unsafe even to visit, let alone to live in. The division between the desirable and undesirable varies, of course; some are half-and-half, some are two-thirds miserable, some are even four-fifths miserable. Baltimore may be one of the worst, in its crime and poverty statistics, but it truly doesn’t stand alone.
What are the causes of these problems, what are the solutions? Which politicians are more concerned with listing the problems, and which ones are focused on trying to work toward solutions?
The Great Society and the Welfare State
There once was a time – long, long ago – when this country’s leadership stuck to the vision of our Founding Fathers: providing a severely limited government for the citizenry, inexpensive to run and inoffensive to commerce. The country saw its job as providing roads so we could get around, a stable currency so we can transact business, a criminal justice system to remove miscreants from our neighborhoods, and a military to defend us in case we were attacked. Such a small, limited government didn’t require a ton of taxes to maintain; we didn’t even have an income tax until the twentieth century.
But then came the Wilson administration, and then FDR, and LBJ, and Clinton, and Obama. For a century now, our government has grown in size and scope, providing “services” such as food aid, and housing aid, and education aid, and transportation aid. With the government providing so much to “help” the poor, the government costs infinitely more to run, and that means skyrocketing taxes, to the point that for many of us, fully half of our income goes to this panoply of taxes. From state and federal income tax, to employee and employer Social Security / Medicare tax, and more. We pay taxes on our fuel, our food, our homes, our cars, our purchases and our sales. Everything is taxed, and it sure adds up.
As a result, government can afford to provide all sorts of benefits, but they are benefits with a hook: Once you start receiving them, it’s very hard to get off them. The welfare state is amazingly similar to the opiates that were once prescribed as painkillers; they help at first, but then you become addicted, and the very same benefits are transformed from a blessing to a manacle in a matter of weeks.
Do you need housing, a meal, clean clothes, healthcare? Certainly.
- But if you have to work to earn them yourself, then you are rewarded for working harder, by a raise in your standard of living.
- And if you receive them from the government as welfare benefits, then you are punished for working harder, because the benefits are (naturally) removed as you no longer qualify for them. There is a period of time in the early stretch of a career in which going from “welfare recipient” to “honorable worker” actually hurts; it causes a drop in one’s standard of living.
So many simply do not, or think they cannot, make that shift, so people are trapped for generations in the Welfare State. This is especially destructive to cities, because they have such a concentration of welfare program “opportunities.” Once a city is stuck with a welfare ghetto, that ghetto’s tendency is to spread, and to displace the more desirable portions of the city. While there is certainly terrible corruption in the city halls of many of these miserable cities, it’s the Welfare State that’s most responsible for their downfall. Even with a squeaky clean city government, Baltimore and Chicago would still be miserable.
These welfare ghettos – with their lack of potential employees and their crime – therefore drive out the very employers they so desperately need. Stores, factories, distribution centers, and their employees move to the suburbs, or even to other states. As they leave, the businesses that used to serve them – dry cleaners, restaurants, grocery stores and other stores – follow them to their new locations, leaving the city with empty apartments, empty houses, empty storefronts, empty factories.
And as the taxpaying population flees, the cities must pay for their bloated governments (remember, it was the welfare state that bloated them) by raising taxes on the ever-fewer taxpayers they have left, and by begging their state governments for more aid to the city, which renders their entire states unlivable (cf. Illinois and California).
It is indeed a vicious circle.
Problems and Solutions
Calling attention to the problem is easy. Cite the statistics on crime and unemployment, on fatherless families and gang violence, and you’re sure to get respect from the audience for caring. But it doesn’t accomplish anything.
By contrast, the politicians who focus on solving these problems have a harder time of it. When you blame the Welfare State, you get accused of being uncaring. When you call for stricter law enforcement and stiffer penalties, you’re called harsh. When you fight for relaxations on minimum wage rules and environmental regulations in order to invite factories and other employers back in, you’re called reactionary. But it is the only way.
We have seen a century of Welfare State policies, and we have seen the damage they’ve done. Even in an era of economic growth, with business startups and hiring up, with companies moving back to America from overseas at last, with the stock market at record highs and employment at an amazing 157 and a quarter million… even with all this… the big cities have been the slowest to turn around, because they have the most to overcome. The bigger the welfare ghetto, the harder it is for the beneficial private economy to return to the city.
Eventually, after a century of erecting barriers to growth, barriers to employment, barriers to prosperity, those barriers have become almost insurmountable (Walls really DO work, after all).
The time has come to admit the truth. While Baltimore has gotten the brunt of it over the past week, it’s true of so many big cities. All of them – from Baltimore to St Paul, from Chicago to Los Angeles – need to work to free their cities of the destruction brought by welfare. Sanctuary status attracts undeserving welfare recipients; revoking sanctuary status will repel them. True crackdowns on gang crime will make the streets safer, and more welcoming to potential employers. Cutting out the corruption in obtaining business licenses will help the small businesses come back; pension reform and tax cuts will help businesses of all sizes return.
It really isn’t all that complicated; just look at everything that has driven employers and prosperity out of our cities for the past hundred years, and stop doing it.
Unfortunately, as long as our mayors and city councils remain unchanged, the odds of saving these sad cities aren’t great.
We do have a template: on the national scale, as we watch the successes of the Trump Economy these past 2.5 years, we do know exactly what works.
We just need the leaders of our cities to cut out the politics of graft, Marxism and destruction, and open their eyes… to the limitless potential of limited government.
Copyright 2019 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international trade professional, writer and actor. A former county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been a recovering politician now for over 22 years.
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