‘Blue’ Governance Has Failed Repeatedly
In a recent feature listing the “50 most dangerous cities in America,” CBS reported: “In 2019, FBI data show there were an estimated 366.7 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in the United States. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program classifies murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault as violent crimes.”
Reviewing the fifty most dangerous cities’ governance reveals that six are run by Republicans (only one, San Bernardino, CA, is among the top ten – number 10), two have at-large or unaffiliated mayors, and the other forty-two – 84 percent – are “blue” – or Democrat – cities that for decades, some for generations have been governed by the same party.
Major U.S. cities saw their murder rates increase by an average of 35.7% through September compared to 2019. Ironically, people of color account for the majority of gun-related deaths, and, for the most part, police aren’t doing the shooting.
New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, all certifiably-dangerous blue cities, didn’t make the 2019 list, but they’re shoo-ins for 2020, along with the 2019-listed blue cities that hosted riots.
The left-liberal urban anarchy there – rioting, arson, looting and public endangerment – taught blue-city residents that their lives, properties and businesses are no longer safe, because mayors and some governors handcuffed or stopped law enforcement, and, effectively, encouraged – or, at least, tolerated – wide-spread criminality.
Officials in dangerous, blue communities attempt to deflect attention from their crime problems with defensive, evasive, cynical incantations like “social justice,” when, in fact, their permissive policies, corruption and incompetence are directly responsible.
Over time, implicitly-sanctioned lawlessness hollows out blue communities.
Out-of-control crime drives away citizens, including cities’ black and Hispanic middle classes. Ironically, the more “blue” – or Democrat – a city is, the greater its level of income inequality, a circumstance every exodus worsens.
Blue city officials who humor left-liberal demands to defund the police will make their communities uninhabitable. Some, including areas of Baltimore (number 1 for robberies, number 2 for murders) and Detroit (a runner-up), already are.
Following Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy filing, writer Michael Walsh described the city’s appearance: “…devastated, as in Carthage just before the salt trucks arrived.”
In 2015, Detroit officials executed liens on tens of thousands of tax delinquent homes, then put some up for public auction to pay for an unaffordable city government that had already failed to discharge its fundamental municipal responsibilities.
Commentator George Will remarked: “[W]hat did [Detroiters] vote for? For 60 years, they voted for incompetents, malcontents and in some cases, criminals.”
Detroit is not alone.
Blue city officials, already lacking the will and skills necessary to deal with the messes they created or worsened, learned nothing from Detroit’s collapse. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Minneapolis, among others, are bleeding residents and businesses – as are most of the states in which they’re located, usually for the same reasons.
In fact, blue cities are microcosms of a national phenomenon.
The massive public debt burdens common to blue jurisdictions, and the high taxes and inevitable tax increases that accompany debt contribute to their failures.
People, business enterprises and wealth are moving from dense, bureaucratic jurisdictions where local and state policies inhibit personal freedom, public safety and economic growth to business- and people-friendly places where tax and regulatory climates, housing and commercial real estate prices, safety, energy and labor costs are more favorable.
Elected Democrats in deep-blue cities and states already cannot pay their bills, including exploding unfunded public employee pension liabilities that only become more urgent over time. In short, they lack the resources to deliver on the promises they’ve already made, but still face competition over and demands to distribute power and dwindling/nonexistent resources between and among the disparate interest groups that comprise their very loose party-affiliated “base.”
America is rapidly becoming two nations. Cities and states with low taxes and other personal/regulatory/financial incentives are growing. Cities and states with high taxes and redistributive economies are stagnating – or worse.
The poverty and dismal graduation rates, jobless numbers, crime statistics and sense of despair in all of America’s worst, most dangerous cities document their failures.
But blue city voters elect – and, usually, reelect – the people who fail them. Sadly, in one-party jurisdictions, there’s no incentive or pressure to improve.
If Congress bills suburban/exurban/rural taxpayers to bail them out financially, blue cities will never improve.
They’ll just get worse, only more expensively.
