the money is pocket change in comparison to the whole budget, but you don't want the federal government being in charge of solving inner city problems. they wont be able to, you want inner cities to be in charge of inner city problems.
That is precisely the problem. Take most any major inner city with substantial blight and poverty problems and guess who's been running them since at least the 1970's. Yup, and they're even worse-off for it.
This is one pristine example of where democracy can run amuck, an inordinately uneducated and 'slighted' constituency, deeply mired in their own misery and ignorance, falls prey to race hustling politicians, overwhelmingly electing one incompetent administration after another after another, from city councilmen to the mayor.
Marion Barry has to top anyone's list of the most inept public official and city manager in history. His administration is equally inept and has brought Washington DC nothing but harm. Further, he is a convicted drug user.
Yet, despite being the laughing stock of the country, his constituency loves him, and would elect him over and over as long as he ran for election, because he goes into their churches, gets up in front of the congregation, and preaches like an evangelist minister, lamenting their suffering; 'I feel yo pain bruthus and sistus, with Good God Almighty as mah witness, I feel your pain!' They then kiss his rings on the way out, figuratively, of course, but not all that figuratively, and he [successfully] covers the incompetence of his own administration by playing upon their racial grievances and misery.
This same model plays out with only slight variations on the same basic theme, but no variation in the results, across the US in three dozen or more major cities; Detroit, Flint, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Gary, et. al.
In Detroit, the result has been the most scandal ridden and incompetently managed school district in the nation, bar none, with several hundred million dollars worth of improvements and construction projects years behind schedule with no end in sight and as much as $80 million which just went 'missing'.
So badly managed was the Detroit school system, the State of Michigan placed it under State Receivership, a very uncommon and extreme move, much to the vehement opposition of Detroit's mayor, city council members, school administrators, and unions, of course, who employed every 'excuse' in their arsenal to 'explain away' their incompetence, even resorting to such desperate and despicable lengths as to make this into a racial issue between Michigan's [then] white Republican Governor and Detroit's Socialist black leaders.
This extreme measure gives the State of Michigan complete oversight of the school district, under the direction of an appointee who reports to the Governor and has veto power over all local interests and authorities, even elected officials; effectively stripping away this intransigent, politically entrenched, incompetent, and wasteful layer of bureaucracy, removing them from the equation.
Its the best thing that could have ever happened to Detroit's school system. The only downside is that, at some point, the State will have no other choice but to relinquish control of the school district back into the hands of the same political interests which have proven from sea to shining sea to be nothing but an economic trainwreck.
This followed a measure passed by the Michigan legislature which banned school administrators from joining unions. The entire Detroit school system, from the janitor, to the principal, to the highest school administrators, were all unionized, if you can imagine such a thing. The fox guarding the hen house.
In Flint, the result has been similar, with the state threatening every year to place the entire city into State Receivership due to years of growing debt and hand-wringing on the part of Flint's intransigent leftwing political leaders who refuse to tackle tough problems because tough problems require tough solutions, and in this case, tough solutions means telling the unions to take a flying leap, and most of these politicians owe their existence to the unions.
Name your city, Philadelphia, Gary, whatever; same story, different players.
The best thing that could happen to many of these cities would be for their State government or Federal government to take them over giving no deference to any of those local political interests which have only managed to turn surmountable problems into seemingly insurmountable ones.
tommy thomson as gov of michigan cut their welfare rolls in half, he used the state's welfare allotment to focus on job training with great results. the problem can't be solved just with money, it is a cultural and structural problem.
That was John Engler.