The Obama White House, everyone: Attacking the symptoms instead of the underlying disease, one ultra-lame rehashed progressive ploy at a time.
That's a reaction to the White House's announced "promise zones," the first five of which will be in San Antonio, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Southeastern Kentucky and the Chioctaw Nation of Oklahoma, communities "where no matter how hard you work it is virtually impossible to get ahead." Yeah, I'm from Southeaster Kentucky, and I can tell you how far ahead the "help" of the federal government got that region. To elaborate:
That Democrats are full of expensive and ultimately unsustainable ideas for helping people temporarily cope with poverty (i.e., the welfare state), but are pretty much intellectually bankrupt when it comes to actually creating opportunities for people to lift themselves out of that poverty (i.e., economic growth and job creation).
[. . .]
The Obama administration is once again using the federal government as a tool to select winners and losers, using more bureaucracy — via the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, and Commerce, good grief — to create top-down faux-collaboration that bypasses the states and in which the feds will decide upon “targeted investments” that they should not be making in the first place with “free money” we do not have.
Instead of picking a few areas here and there that merit special tax credits and write-offs, why not lower taxes for the entire United States? What the whole country really needs to fight poverty are streamlined regulations, less red tape, fewer taxes, less prohibitive labor laws, less government spending, and less national debt at the macro level — not band-aids and spot treatment that will cost taxpayers even more money while leaving the infrastructure perpetuating our weaksauce economic recovery in place.
AAAAA-MEN! It can't be said often enough: If you feel compelled to give an incentive, you are as much as admitting that whatever you're forgiving people from following shouldn't be there in the first place. It can't be said often enough because it will never sink in for some people, especially those who benefit from the power of being able to grant the forgiveness.
