The Homa Files

Last night, the Daily Caller released an “explosive” new tape of Obama speaking to a group of black ministers at Hampton college in 2007.

I didn’t think the tape’s revelations were all that explosive.

But, one part of the report did catch my attention:

Obama said: “We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs,” where, the implication is, the rich white people live.

Instead, Obama says, federal money should flow to “our neighborhoods”.

No problem with the last part … I’m all for urban development … transportation, schools, businesses.

The rub is that Obama positioned a zero sum game between the cities and the suburbs … with redistribution from the suburbs to the cities.

First, I don’t recollect his being so direct on that point in his campaign speeches … hmmm.

Second, brought to mind a recent book on the subject that I largely dismissed at first glance.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities”.

His central premise was summarized in Forbes:

In the eyes of the leftist community organizers, suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor.

To reverse the trend, some groups advocate systematically redistributing the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities via “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs.

President Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to the 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.”

Suburbs are for sellouts: That is a large and overlooked theme of Obama’s famous memoir, Dreams from My Father. The city is the moral choice.

He attributed urban decline to taxpayer “flight” to the suburbs.

So, compulsory redistribution of suburban tax money to cities was the only lasting solution to urban decay.

Obama’s uncovered Hampton speech may boost Kurtz’ book sales and unsettle some suburbanites … especially those sitting in bumper-to-bumper commuting traffic.

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This entry was posted on October 3, 2012 at 6:45 am and is filed under 2012 Campaign, Redistribution, Suburbs, Urban development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.