Then Ralph Moore, himself an activist and a lifelong resident, rushes up to Mckesson to shake his hand — and to break the bad news: Moore is voting for Sheila Dixon, the former mayor who resigned amid ethics charges and is running again. She's one of the front-runners in polls ahead of Tuesday's Democratic primary — the de facto election in this majority African-American city.
Second: Mayor wants to cut trash subsidy to Houston HOA's. Mike Morris, HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)
The idea when the program started in the 1970s was that residents should not have to pay property taxes for city trash services they were not receiving - particularly because they were already paying for waste pickup in their homeowner association dues. The city also came out ahead because the $6 monthly per-house subsidy was cheaper than the cost of the city serving each home itself, now estimated at $18 per home per month.
In the case of Baltimore, the city has already pursued, for decades now, policies that punished the citizenry with ruinous taxes and little to no core services in pursuit of a patronage system that rewarded the courtesan class at the expense of the taxpayer. Their fix for all of this?
Re-elect Sheila Dixon, who was so bad at playing this game she got caught red-handed.
In the case of Houston you have a city, within a State, that has been fairly prosperous due, in most part, to relatively high oil prices which buttressed it's number one industry. During those fat years Houston moved further and further down the patronage hole where now, when prices are not as strong, you have what Progressives like to call a "structural deficit" meaning that there is more money going out then current taxation levels let you bring in. The solution to this, of course, is to increase taxes greatly without appreciably increasing services. This ensures that the TIRZ carve-outs and the pet-policy concerns of the courtesan class continue unabated, although funded to an even greater extent on the backs of the city's rapidly diminishing work force.
This is a progressive model of urban governance that we are witnessing with more and more frequency and the result is always the same. Financial disaster and a desperate attempt to find some blame by the people who caused the issue in the first place.
Most often this "blame" is cast toward some politician(s) further up the food chain, preferably with an (R) behind their name and who does not support the current patronage system. In Flint Michigan, the mark was Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) who had the misfortune of appointing the emergency administrator (D) who basically poured gasoline on a grass fire in the municipal water situation. What progressives conveniently forget to mention is that the fire was already burning out of control, and had been, for many years. The root cause of the tragedy in Flint was not the unfortunate decision to take water from the local lake, and process it in a plant and system that couldn't handle it, but the ridiculous spending levels which placed Flint in financial straits that had been going on for years.
Where it is appropriate to cast blame at the GOP is in their absolute refusal to attempt to seriously address urban issues. The Tea Party, with their misspelled signs and righteous indignation, spoke of financial bailouts and "unsustainable debt" at the federal level but all but ignored the even more potentially ruinous debt mushrooming locally. In Texas, it took failed GOP Comptroller Susan Combs (enabler of one of the biggest tax increases in recent Texas history as well as the overseer of one of the biggest data breaches in State history) to point out that municipal debt is spiraling out of control as well.
Sadly, it could be that the cities are lost. Machine politics are too ingrained, the damage is too severe and the electorate is clearly showing signs of insanity by turning back to the people who got them in this mess hoping they'll fix it by doing the same things that created the mess in the first place.
Whatever follows the GOP is going to have to have issues for these urban problems beyond "cut government" or "cut taxes for the wealthy". They're going to have to develop conservative solutions to progressive-made problems and present them in a way that urban voters understand and will adopt.
The problem is, how do you negotiate with a large group of people who are clearly happy to vote in an insane manner? If Republicans in Baltimore cannot beat someone like Sheila Dixon (Or, even worse, DeRay McKesson) then what the hell good are they to the residents of Baltimore at all?
In Houston, they couldn't beat a politician who is so reflective of the system of political patronage he's better known for who supports him (Texas State Senator Whitmire) than for anything he's accomplished himself.
Even more disconcerting is the fact that conservative choice Bill King had what was a good message and ran, by all accounts, a pretty good campaign. And it still wasn't enough.
Given that, what in the hell will ever be "enough"?
