Reply to DC Mayor: Tell me if you are supporting Robert White and why

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Reply to "DC Mayor: Tell me if you are supporting Robert White and why "

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]

Anonymous wrote:

People who have jobs don’t commit crimes. On the one hand you’re complaining about crime but now you’re upset that the government is proposing to give nonworking people a helping hand. Police don’t solve crime. The point is to prevent it which means keeping kids in school and youth active and the unemployed with an income.

Not subsidizing the multigenerational public housing in hot locations prevents crime, in those locations. I hear locking up the violent criminals helps too.[/quote]

No kidding.  People under the age of 40 do not remember the days of Marion Barry's governance.   The patronage job system resulted in a dysfunctional DC government where people barely came to work and when they did, they didn't do very much.  The middle class fled the city because of the high taxes imposed to support this "government as employer for all approach"---the white middle class had largely abandoned the city by the mid 80s, and the middle class AA abandoned the city in droves in the 1990s---resulting in Prince George's becoming the most affluent majority minority county in the US.

When I moved to DC in early 1994, the city was a study in income inequality---a highly affluent, predominantly white minority who lived in upper NW and sent their kids to private school, and a mostly poor minority majority who lived everywhere else and sent their kids to schools that were run by a school board (and a Marion Barry patronage jobs central office) that was dysfunctional in the extreme.  The school buildings were completely falling apart, textbooks sat undelivered in warehouses, and the schools couldn't even start on time.  It was almost Soviet in its incompetence---when no one can ever get fired, no one does any work.  Eventually the city fell apart financially (no surprise there) and was run by a federally appointed control board, with Tony Williams as the person charged with digging the District out of its financial hole.  Tony Williams went on to become DC's mayor and most, if not all, of the city's re-attracting middle class residents and revitalizing previously burned out strips like 14th Street NW and H Street NE occurred as a result of his initiatives.  It confounds me that so many millennial progressives---who enjoy the vibrancy of areas which were open-air drug markets not so long ago---want to elect people who will take us right back to those bad old days.  
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You believe it would be a path to the bad old days.  I don't.  I hope that helps you understand why we differ.[/quote]

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