wrote in message
...
On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:54:08 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

wrote in message
news
On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:02:31 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

"JohnH" wrote in message
m...
On Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:02:43 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

"Toots Sweet" wrote in message
...
Democrats are for fair elections, helping the poor, assisting those
in
need, the disenfranchised and minorities everywhere. Which is a good
thing.

At the same time, Democrats have been in charge of the major cities,
New York, New Orleans, Chicago, etc., for the past 50 years.

Think about that.

Think states, not cities and you'll see the light.

And what is wrong with thinking about cities? Do the majority of the
poor not live in large cities?
--

John H


Do you think they would live in the country with no services available?

I really think that is the biggest flaw in the "Great Society"
program. They piled all the welfare money up in the city where the
people were concentrated in ghettos instead of spreading it out across
the countryside and diluting the problem.
If you are trying to find jobs for a few marginally qualified people
per town it is easier than having them all in one area. The cost of
living is also lower out in the country if you are just sending them a
check.
Unfortunately with the collapse of the manufacturing base in this
country marginally skilled people are in serious trouble, no matter
where they live but that is another problem..



Pretty hard to offer services onezee twozee don't you think? Not very cost
effective or practical. The Great Society did a lot of good, but it wasn't
perfect.

The problem is that the federal government was doing this. If it was
local government or even local charity, onezee twozee is not that
hard to do.
I lived in SE DC when the great society programs hit and I saw those
neighborhoods decline into the cesspools they are now (Marion Barry's
8th ward for you folks outside the beltway)
People flocked to the cities because that was where the money was.
What used to be families of "working poor" (a government defined term)
became non working welfare recipients.
The programs rewarded women without a man in the house and punished
the families where dad stayed, so the men left.
It doesn't take many generations of absent fathers to create the mess
we have now.
I said then and I still think, we went the wrong way. The incentive
should have been to spread these people out, not concentrate them.
It is a whole lot easier to accommodate and find jobs for a few
families in the country than it is to do this for a half million
people in a city.
Unfortunately I think the way the great society was implemented was
racist in the worst way. Instead of encouraging people out in flyover
country to embrace a few black people, they created an all black
ghetto in the city where there was very little contact with each
other.



There are some things that the Federal gov't does better than local gov'ts.
Just because what you saw was bad doesn't mean the concept or even a lot of
the implementation was bad. One can always find examples of system abuse.
Certainly the answer to the problem now is not to abandon people in the
inner city (well, any more than we've already done).

--
Nom=de=Plume