Jim Quinn:
It’s that time of year again – when the little juvenile delinquents, future prison inmates, and functionally illiterate junior members of the free s*** army pick up their “free” backpacks and “free” school supplies they will never use and shuffle off to the decaying prison like schools in the City of Philadelphia to eat “free” breakfasts and “free” lunches, while being taught government sanctioned pablum by overpaid mediocre union teachers.
It’s a repeat of every year for the Phila school district. As the school year approaches they are shocked to report a massive deficit and beg the State of PA for more funding. The $12,000 per child simply isn’t enough, even though Parochial schools provide ten times the education for $9,000 per child. The district has a slight $80 million deficit this year. Last year they had a $100 million deficit and the mayor proposed a soda tax to fill the gap. It was defeated, so they raised property taxes instead. Mayor Nutter’s name is fitting. He is just another in a long line of Democratic mayors who have ruled Philadelphia since the 1950′s and whose policies of welfare handouts for their voting base paid for by taxing the producers, has resulted in a population decline from 2.1 million in 1950 to 1.5 million today. Doug Casey captures the essence of Philly with this definition:
Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy): a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
The liberal solution to an ever decreasing tax base and an ever growing level of benefits for the free s*** army and government union drones, is to increase taxes on the few remaining producers. They then flee the city, leaving fewer producers to tax. Rinse and repeat. Your neighborhoods then look like this.
The mayor, school district superintendent, and teacher’s union use the liberal mainstream media to sound the alarm about “devastating” budget cuts that will imperil the tremendous education the cherubs will receive. They warn that the school year will have to be delayed. They peddle mistruths about the governor cutting education funding in an attempt to influence public opinion. Their “solution” to the budget deficit this year is a doozy. I’ll get to that later. First I have to provide a mural update.
I drive past the Morton McMichael grade school in Mantua every day on my way to work. It sits across the street from the $27 million low income gated townhouse community called Mantua Square, paid for with your Obama stimulus funds in 2011. (Update: The 8 storefronts built into the project two years ago and touted as a way to revitalize commerce in Mantua still sit vacant – 100% NO OCCUPANCY. This follows the old liberal economic theorem of build it and they won’t come.) This school looks like it could be in a Dickens novel from the 1800′s. That’s fitting since Morton McMichael was a prominent citizen of Philadelphia during the 1800′s as founder of the Saturday Evening Post and Mayor of Philadelphia. That was back when a white man could get elected mayor of Philadelphia.
Yep, storefront space built into a cesspool to revitalize a neighborhood, where the owners of the business will be deemed to be ‘wealthy’. As a result of this new found ‘wealth’ opening a business they will become targets for nightly armed robberies by the prison poster children at night and have any money they earned will be stolen buy the local political class who foster the politics of envy and hatred of hard work.
The only business that going to be successful in that hood is ran by the local drug lords who pay off the local politicians in cash whose store front is a abandoned roach and vermin infested building, that long ago used to be the home of a respectable family in the neighborhood.
Thanks to the politicians who think first about enriching themselves like 3rd world scum who know that the worse the hood is the more money the DC bureaucrats throw at them to line their pockets.