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

Its Time for Cities to Reject the Welfare MentalityAll everyplace the nation-from refreshing York to Los Angeles, from San Diego to Milwaukee-cities are on the rebound. Each successful city has fulfil its renaissance in its own particular way, with its own special twist. notwithstanding if you look across the spectrum of flourishing cities, you can discern a imbibe set of principles that leads to urban health. To start with, there is a total rejection of the honest-to-god municipal welfare state ideology, whose decades of failed policies led the nations cities to the brink. Urban government, that idea went, was higher up tot each(prenominal)y to achieve social justice and the uplift of the poor. It seemed to make virtuoso Cities always had big concentrations both of poor people to help and of riches to tax. So cities piled on welfare benefits and social services, created huge bureaucracies to administer them, and taxed intempe positionly to fund them. But things didnt wor k out as expected. With the information revolution, all those companies whose great skyscrapers made them look eternally rooted there no longer had to be in the cities to be near their suppliers, customers, or bankers. And world-wide competition required them to get efficient and cut costs. No more than could they justify paying high corporate income taxes, commercial rent taxes, high-minded 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 moving ins of the past decade or more never started up in many of the old cities. Result A city resembling New York has created not one single net new job since World War II. Worse, the costly municipal welfare state move out not to work. All the indicators are worse, not better, than when the whole hand over effort began. The inner city illegitimacy rate is way up, the urban high school graduation rate way dow n. The penury rate hasnt dropped and, until the new-paradigm reforms, the welfare dependency rate had soared. All these billions of dollars made things worse, because, we learned, if communities dont make their citizens in person responsible for themselves and their families, but instead tell them theyre victims, they will become mutualist and demoralized. If the welfare state tells people that its fine to have illegitimate children, that poverty excuses crime, that welfare payments are appropriate reparations for historical victimization, and that working in cul de sac jobs for chump change is undignified-what can possibly result but illegitimacy, crime, welfare dependency, and non-work?