It’s Time for Cities to Reject the Welfare Mentality :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Its Time for Cities to Reject the Welfare MentalityAll over the nation-from New York to Los Angeles, from San Diego to Milwaukee-cities are on the rebound. Each successful city has concluded its renaissance in its own particular way, with its own special twist. But if you look across the spectrum of flourishing cities, you can discern a clear exercise set of principles that leads to urban health. To start with, there is a total rejection of the old municipal offbeat state ideology, whose decades of failed policies led the nations cities to the brink. Urban government, that idea went, was above all to reach out social justice and the uplift of the poor. It seemed to make sense Cities always had big concentrations both of poor people to help and of wealth to tax. So cities piled on welfare benefits and social services, created huge bureaucracies to administer them, and taxed heavily to fund them. But things didnt work out as expected. With the information revolution, all those com panies whose great skyscrapers made them look forever and a day rooted there no longer had to be in the cities to be near their suppliers, customers, or bankers. And global competition required them to get efficient and drop costs. No more could they justify paying high corpo prescribe income taxes, commercial rent taxes, inflated utility taxes. So the number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in New York fell from 140 in 1947 to 31 now. And the new, smaller businesses that have generated all of the new jobs of the past decade or more never started up in many of the old cities. Result A city like New York has created not one single net new job since world War II. Worse, the costly municipal welfare state turned out not to work. All the indicators are worse, not better, than when the whole rescue effort began. The inward city illegitimacy rate is way up, the urban high school graduation rate way down. The poverty rate hasnt dropped and, until the new-paradigm reforms, the we lfare dependency rate had soared. All these billions of dollars made things worse, because, we learned, if communities dont make their citizens personally responsible for themselves and their families, but instead tell them theyre victims, they will become dependent and demoralized. If the welfare state tells people that its first-rate to have illegitimate children, that poverty excuses crime, that welfare payments are appropriate reparations for historical victimization, and that working in dead-end jobs for chump change is undignified-what can possibly event but illegitimacy, crime, welfare dependency, and non-work?