FORBES: How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities

By Stanley Kurtz

OP/ED 

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8/13/2012

Political experts left and right agree: the coming election will be decided by America’s suburbanites.  From Florida to Virginia on across the country, in every battleground state, they are the key demographic. All of which raises a question that has not been considered as yet, and ought to be: is President Obama’s re-election in the suburbanites’ interest?  The answer emphatically is no.

As many Americans do not know, in the eyes of the leftist community organizers who trained Obama, suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor.  Obama adopted this view early on, and he has never wavered from this ideological commitment, as a review of his actions in office goes to show.

President Obama’s plans for a second-term include an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities.  It’s a transformative idea, and deserves to be fully aired before the election.  But like a lot of his major progressive policy innovations, Obama has advanced this one stealthily–mostly through rule-making, appointment, and vague directives.  Obama has worked on this project in collaboration with Mike Kruglik, one of his original community organizing mentors.  Kruglik’s new group, Building One America, advocates “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs.  Kruglik’s group also favors a raft of policies designed to coerce people out of their cars and force suburbanites (with their tax money) back into densely packed cities.

Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to Kruglik’s efforts.  A federal program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the country with “regional equity” and “smart growth” as goals.  These are, of course, code words.  “Regional equity” means that, by their mere existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities.  It means, “Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor. “Smart growth” means, “Quit building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit can shuttle you between your 800 square foot apartment in an urban tower and your downtown job.” In all likelihood, these planning commissions will issue “recommendations” which Obama would quickly turn into requirements for further federal aid.  In fact, his administration has already used these tactics to impose federal education requirements on reluctant states.  Indeed, part of Obama’s assault on the suburbs is his effort to undercut the autonomy of suburban school districts.

Read the rest at Forbes....

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