Poverty is a Self-Inflicted Disease
A few years ago, in the business section of USA Today, a story appeared that described how businesses are returning to some inner cities to set up shop. The article is encouraging. Real estate is plentiful and prices are low. Many who work downtown also live there. That’s the good news.
Of course, once these companies become successful, politicians will tax the daylights out of them. It’s these taxing policies that end up killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
In addition to the upbeat nature of the story of small companies of trying to make it big downtown, there was an educational statistic that was shocking:
“The inner harbor of Baltimore has a 20% poverty rate and a 50% high school dropout rate.”
Uneducated teenagers have few marketable skills. They can’t work to learn new skills because (1) wealth transfer payments via welfare make it unprofitable to work and (2) minimum wage legislation prices them out of the job pool, especially in this tough economic climate.
Further in the article we learn that “unemployment and poverty were at least 50% higher than in the surrounding area.” These conditions can mostly be attributed to government taxing policies. This is why poverty is a self-inflicted disease.
The irony here is that if the inner cities are to be saved, it will be the inner cities that will have to do it. Jobs could be plentiful and high paying. Of course, this will require skilled, mostly college educated workers. But companies cannot survive on computer programmers and engineers alone. They need a diverse work force.
One of the companies has started a mentoring program for at-risk Baltimore high school students. None of the students has dropped out. Where government education and public policy programs fail, private enterprise succeeds. Time will tell if these inner city businesses will make it. Politicians, social theorists, special interest groups, and unions are perched like vultures ready to pick the place clean if the inner cities ever become prosperous again.
http://politicaloutcast.com/2012/07/poverty-is-a-self-inflicted-disease/
I understood that the governor of Maryland said that they have one of the highest per capita of millionaires. They instituted a Millionaires tax and so the governor has come out saying that the those millionaires like this tax. So are millionaires moving to Maryland so they can benefit by paying this tax?
ReplyDeleteThe rich are leaving Maryland like it was a rats nest of plague. Actually, because it's almost made up of democrats with their hands out, it really does have the plague.
ReplyDeleteIf you have a lot of money, Maryland is not the place to be. Steny Hoyer and Elijah Cummings are from here if that says anything.