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Liberals’ smug self-satisfaction is off the charts. All l*****ts everywhere consider themselves to represent the epitome of compassion. Conservatives are full of greed and h**e, they say, contrasted with themselves, brimming with empathy and goodness and sweetness and light.
So why is it, ladies and gentlemen, that every area liberals control is circling the drain? Why is it that liberal rule equals unfathomable suffering for the most vulnerable? All cities and states have good years and bad years, but for Democrat-run locales, every day is a race to the bottom. By any measure, decades of Democrat graft, ineptness, and sloth have left the dwindling number of blue clusters across the nation in collapse.
Not only does everything Democrats touch go to hell, there is zip, zero, nada liberal compassion when it comes to the people forced to live in dying Democrat cities and states. Liberals claim gop “obstruction” is to blame for the disasters of Baltimore or Detroit, but no Republican has been in office there — or in most other urban areas — in many decades. The left owns every square inch of these crumbling Third World hellholes:
Economic Ruin
• The Fiscal Times ranked 116 U.S. cities in order of fiscal strength, evaluating their debt, funds available, change in property values, and pension contributions. Clustered at the bottom were deep blue, liberal-run cities, among them Chicago (dead last, at #116), New York (#115), St. Louis (#112), Philadelphia (#111), Cleveland (#106), and Portland (#103).
• Of the 15 worst states in America to make a living, ten are blue states (CT, RI, NV, NM, NY, ME, VT, HI, OR, CA). MoneyRates based its 2016 ratings on median wages, state tax rates, cost of living, unemployment rate, and workplace accidents. Four out of the best five states — Texas, Wyoming, Washington, Virginia, and North Dakota — are gop-run.
• “Comptroller: Illinois’ Finances Are in a ‘Massive Crisis Mode.’” — ap, 6/18/17
• “Illinois budgets for decades have been nothing but a moth-eaten collection of lies … designed to disguise Illinois’ real problems: failure to rein in spending coupled with a very business unfriendly environment. As Illinois’ bond rating careens towards junk, Illinois’ unpaid bills jumped to $14.3 billion. Today, the state told contractors to halt roadwork other than that required for safety.” — Zero Hedge, 6/15/17
• “The Windy City has become a poster child for financial mismanagement, having suffered a series of ratings downgrades in recent years. Aside from having thin reserves and large volumes of outstanding debt, Chicago is notorious for its underfunded pension plans.” — The Fiscal Times, 1/9/17
• “The Philadelphia metro area was ranked 250th for economic growth … in a survey by the Brookings Institution of the world’s 300 biggest metropolitan economies.” — Philadelphia magazine, 3/2/15. Washington D.C. fared even worse, at #276.
Crushing Poverty
• The poverty rate in the U.S. is 13.5 percent, while the poverty rate in Detroit is a whopping 48.1 percent. Other poverty rates of Dem-run cities: Cleveland (42.6), Milwaukee (34.5), Memphis (33.5), Philadelphia (31.5), St. Louis (30.0), Baltimore (28.2), and Chicago (27.3).
• “Baltimore’s property taxes are twice as high as those of any other jurisdiction in Maryland or the District of Columbia … [and what] does Baltimore have to show for its gargantuan expenditures? Not much at all. Today, the city’s residents have a median household income that is about 45 percent below Maryland’s state average, and a poverty rate nearly 70 percent higher than the national average. Among America’s 100 most populous cities, Baltimore ranks 87th in median household income.” — FrontPage Magazine, 4/29/15
• “The unemployment rate for black men in Baltimore between the ages of 20-24 is 37 percent.” — The Washington Post, 5/4/15
• In 1970, the number of Detroit citizens in “high poverty” (with a poverty rate at least double the national average) was 38,589; by 2010 that had climbed to 228,450. Milwaukee’s high-poverty rate quadrupled from 20,581 in 1970 to 96,443 in 2010, according to City Observatory.
• “Philadelphia has the highest rate of deep poverty — people with incomes below half of the poverty line — of any of the nation’s 10 most populous cities.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/19/13
• It’s not just the low-income who suffer under Democrat regimes. Brookings analyzed the average top salaries of residents of the 50 largest cities; Dem-run cities were at the very bottom — Detroit at #50, Cleveland at #49, and Milwaukee at #48.
Exploding Crime
• According to the latest available fbi figures, America’s eight most dangerous cities are: Detroit, Memphis, Oakland, St. Louis, Birmingham, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Cleveland, as reported by Forbes.
• Large cities with the highest murder rate, according to fbi figures and reported by cbs: St. Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, Newark. Democrat-run.
• All Democrat-run. “[Baltimore’s] violent crime rate is almost four times higher than the national average. As a Cato Institute report puts it: ‘Baltimore deserves the Third World profile it has developed…’” — FrontPage Magazine, 4/29/15
• “The community’s [Sandtown-Winchester] murder rate is double the average for Baltimore (which, in turn, had the fifth-highest murder rate last year among major U.S. cities). The state spends $17 million a year just to incarcerate Sandtown-Winchester residents.” — “The Baltimore Democrats Built,” The Washington Post, 5/4/15
• “Just a couple miles away from ‘Hands Up Don’t Shoot’ epicenter Ferguson, [St. Louis] has been ravaged by bleed-over protests and a lack of stability. The city’s police have been … harangued by racial agitators as the city sinks deeper into financial ruin.” — “The Five Worst-Run Major American Cities,” The Daily Wire, 1/10/17
Liberal Ine******y
• “Of the [Brookings] study’s ten most unequal cities, nine have Democratic mayors. They are Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, New York, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. Only one, Miami, has a Republican mayor.” — Politifact, 1/10/15
• E******y of Opportunity Project rated the 100 largest counties in the country on whether or not they provided economic opportunity to children living there. The worst at #100 was Baltimore, #96 was Chicago’s Cook County, #94 was Detroit’s Wayne County, #93 was Milwaukee.
• According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the national “achievement gap” between black and white students in the country was highest in Washington, D.C., reports Madison.com.
• According to WalletHub’s list of 2016 Least Educated Cities, the largest gap in educational scores between black and white students is found in Milwaukee, which ranks dead last (#138). Memphis is #114.
• “White area households [in Milwaukee] are relatively wealthy compared to the nation, with a median income of $61,675. Black area households, on the other hand, are relatively poor, with a median income of just $25,646. This was one of the nation’s largest income disparities.” — “The Worst Cities for B***k A******ns,” 24/7 Wall Street, 10/16/15
• “A new report from ucla finds that … Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city, suspends black high school students at a rate nearly double the national average.” — “Why Is Milwaukee So Bad for Black People?”, npr, 3/5/15
• “Every year a poor boy spends growing up in Baltimore … his earnings as an adult fall by 1.5 percent. Add up an entire childhood, and that means a 26-year-old man in Baltimore earns about 28 percent less than he would if he had grown up somewhere in average America.” — Nathaniel Hendren, Harvard economist, in The Washington Post, 5/6/15. Hendren and Raj Chetty determined that the absolute worse place for a child to grow up is Baltimore.
• Milwaukee is the nation’s most racially segregated metropolitan area, according to The [Milwaukee] Journal Sentinel.
• “We’ve already had government run by the best and the brightest. And we’ve spent trillions of dollars in America’s war on poverty. And just what has been accomplished? The crime statistics tell you. The jobless numbers tell you. The graduation rates tell you. Open your eyes and see the despair.” — “Road to Urban Despair Paved by Democrats,” Chicago Tribune, 8/19/16
Education Wreck
• “Urban school systems remain broken for students and families. Yet they feed the bureaucrats and the vendors who sell goods and services to education bureaucrats. And the well-fed know what they’re supposed to do on E******n Day: v**e Democratic.” — Chicago Tribune, 8/19/16
• “Of the 75,766 students in the [Milwaukee Public School] district, more than half — 42,421 — are in schools rated as ‘fails to meet expectations’ or ‘meets few expectations.’” — Watchdog.org, 11/17/16. This poor rating was after the state school system “adjusted” the report upwards to account for the severe poverty in the district.
• “In Baltimore, taxpayers are currently spending $16,578 per year for each pupil in the city’s public schools. Not only is this 48 percent more than the national average of $10,608, but it’s more than any other country on the face of the earth spends on public education.” — FrontPage Magazine, 4/29/15
Democrats Built That
The ruin of Dem cities is no accident but intentional, according to the “Curley Effect.” In Forbes Mark Hendrickson explains the concept, developed by Harvard scholars Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer, as the belief that “a politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of v**es in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth … [M]aking a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.”
• “In the 1950s and early 60s, Baltimore was the home of many thriving industries — particularly manufacturing and shipping — that created some three-fourths of all the jobs held by people in its metropolitan region. The city at that time had nearly a million residents, 23 percent of whom were black, and the median family income was 7 percent higher than the national average. In 1967, however, this prosperity began to vanish when Baltimore’s city government was taken over by a string of Democratic mayors who have continuously held power ever since, and have turned much of the city into a grim wasteland.” — FrontPage Magazine, 4/29/15
“What isn’t discussed enough when r**ts happen and neighborhoods burn is the one thing most common to all these decaying urban tinderboxes. They’re run by Democrats … For decade after decade, Democrats have controlled policy and politics in the broken cities … The broken schools have been run by Democrats for decades.
Democrat Excuses
• “Although it is true that Democrats have been in charge of the city for quite a while, Detroit’s decades-long decay is in large part because of historic forces attributable to neither Party.” — “The Odd Republican Obsession with Detroit,” The Washington Post, 8/6/16
• “Flint, MI has been for years and years a Democratic monopoly … and when Flint’s municipal powers were, with the knowledge of Barack Obama’s epa, literally poisoning their residents, that, too, was somehow the fault of a Republican, somewhere.” — “Democratic Party & Urban Poverty: They Blame the gop but Who Runs American Cities?”, National Review, 7/10/16
• “One partial explanation [for the 88.5 percent spike in shootings in Chicago] was that there were record high temperatures over the first quarter of this year.” — Business Insider, 4/11/16
source-those listed above, katha pollitt, the nation, time kaine, cnn,
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