Reply to RHEE-SULTS: A LITTLE RED MEAT FOR THOSE senti-MENTAL Rhee/Kaya supporters... ENJOY!! Fight Back!

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Reply to "RHEE-SULTS: A LITTLE RED MEAT FOR THOSE senti-MENTAL Rhee/Kaya supporters... ENJOY!! Fight Back!"

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[quote=Anonymous]That's a straw man argument, and I'm pretty sure you know it. The "stick" as you term it is nothing of the sort. First, we're not decreasing services in DC. They've never been funded at a higher level. That takes us to the somewhat weasel-y construct "raising the cost of living". Who is this mysterious baddie who is wielding the "stick" by manipulating prices in the city (Maybe the same evil forces that hatched The Plan). You and I both know that's nonsense.

The dynamic is twofold: first the city is increasingly attractive to middle class people. That has two effects: first the price of many things in the city is driven up. This is an inevitable byproduct of the desireability of living here. No one is waving a stick. It's pure market forces.

Now we can talk honestly about substantially increasing the "carrot" to offset those market pressures. What would that look like? I'm not talking about some airy construct like "improve the schools". I'm talking about tangible actions--with costs. And what if we improved the schools and the population of the very poor still fell against the city population as a whole? After all, the city population is growing steadily, which means the denominator is growing. Should we increase social spending in order to bump those numbers back up? After all, you've already conceded that decreasing services and raising the cost of living will make "other jurisdictions become more attractive".  Should we bump up our social spending to better retain our poor residents and better attract poor people from MD and VA and elsewhere in order to keep DC's current socioeconomic profile static?

I'm all for bleeding heart solutions--bleeding head solutions not so much.

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