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John DeStefano, five-term mayor of New
Haven, Conn., and president of the National League of Cities,
gave a hopelessly sentimental speech at the National Press
Club last week.
DeStefano argued that America's towns and
cities, the places where we grew up and went to school, attended
church, married and raised children and buried our parents,
are really the heart of the country.
What's more, he suggested, the investments
our local governments have made over the centuries -- in schools
and libraries and parks, in police and fire protection, in
housing and public health and more -- helped make us the very
special nation we became. Supportive communities gave hundreds
of millions of working class families the opportunity to improve
their lot, generation to generation, becoming members of America's
a strong middle class.
"Cities and towns are not the children,
nor are we the creatures, of America. If anything we're the
creators," said DeStefano, noting that his own city was
already 138 years old when one of his predecessors as mayor,
Roger Sherman, risked life and fortune to sign the Declaration
of Independence.
It's an outrage, DeStefano argued, when
officials of the federal government -- which "reaps the
benefit of revenues and wealth created at the local level"
-- actually denigrate local efforts and dismiss Washington's
limited assistance, for school and crime or housing projects,
as some kind of "handout."
In the hardball world of national politics,
such hometown pleas are considered a touch quaint. Doesn't
DeStefano recognize there are larger interests to be appeased?
Like the wealthiest taxpayers with their inordinate share
of the $1.7 trillion tax cuts Congress approved for a decade?
Or agriculture interests, whose cotton and peanut and dairy
and mohair subsidies boosted last year's farm bill to a six-year
cost of $248 billion?
Then there's the new $400 billion Medicare
prescription drug bill, which not only fails to open big drug
firms to foreign competition but doles out $125 billion over
the next decade in subsidies to the health care industry and
U.S. businesses.
And wait -- the energy bill may have been
stalled in Congress until early next year. But congressional
leaders are still hot to pass it, with its $23.5 billion in
tax breaks, largely for oil and gas producers.
And of course there's the war in Iraq, a
conflict on which Americans remain deeply divided. If the
$121 billion that Congress has so far appropriated for Iraq
were available to America's cities, the proportionate share
for DeStefano's New Haven would be $66 million, available
to cover recession-triggered deficits, to finance schools,
health services, transit and the new burdens added by homeland
security needs.
Using the same formula (calculated by the
National Priorities Council), Seattle would have $360 million,
Cleveland $141 million, Phoenix $532 million, Detroit $271
million, St. Paul $150 million.
"Just waste!" -- some would cry.
But really? What if we could use the money to stimulate local
investment in families, offsetting the doubling of poverty
in young families that's occurred since the early 1970s? Or
to fund all, rather than a fraction of, childhood programs
-- a more likely booster of school performance than "No
Child Left Behind" or any other unfunded federal mandate?
Or what if we could expand the Hope VI housing
program, a sparkling success in turning ravaged public housing
projects into stable new mixed-income communities -- and not
deep-six it, as the Bush administration advocates?
In short, what if we used our treasure to
support our cities and towns, to undergird and expand our
middle class for a brighter shared future?
That DeStefano's dream. But it's surely
not the dream of official Washington, obsessed as it seems
with tax cuts, war and corporate subsidy. Instead, Washington
is cutting aid to cities and towns even while it plunges the
nation into deep seas of red ink -- prospective deficits of
a half trillion dollars a year or so for the rest of this
decade.
"It's rather bizarre," says DeStefano,
"that the federal government is not satisfied with driving
itself into deficit, they've got to drive us into deficit
too."
And it's not just cities and towns that are imperiled by federal
fiscal policy.
The very middle class DeStefano celebrates
will be deeply imperiled. As Concord Coalition chairman Warren
Rudman warns, a continuing plunge into debt, the need to pay
off out massive commitments to creditors foreign or domestic,
will lead -- if it's not corrected in time -- to devaluation
of our currency, massive tax increases and collapsing retirement
accounts.
It makes one wonder how a nation built on
the basic values of fiscal responsibility and careful government
investments to build a strong middle class could wander so
far astray.
Maybe John DeStefano's suggestion that we
focus first on basics, on America's cities and towns and hometown
people and their needs and opportunities, isn't so quaint
after all.
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