White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is quoted in the Washington Times:
“In order to protect the middle class from having their taxes going up, to protect seniors from having to live in a world where Medicare comes in a voucher and their costs skyrocket, millionaires and billionaires need to pay a little bit more.”
The Obama administration is going to protect the middle class?
I don't think so. Stanley Kurtz asserts just the opposite in his new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.
National Review published an adaptation from the book last month; here's an excerpt.
bama’s little-known plans to undermine the political and economic autonomy of America’s suburbs constitute a policy initiative similar in ambition to health-care reform, the stimulus, or “cap-and-trade.” Obama’s anti-suburban plans also supply the missing link that explains his administration’s overall policy architecture.
Since the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the collapse of federal urban policy, leftist theorists of community organizing have advocated a series of moves designed to quietly redistribute tax money to the cities. Health-care reform and federal infrastructure spending (as in the stimulus) are backed by organizers as the best ways to reconstitute an urban policy without directly calling it that. A campaign against suburban “sprawl” under the guise of environmentalism is the next move. Open calls for suburban tax-base “sharing” are the final and most controversial link in the chain of a reconstituted and redistributive urban policy. President Obama is following this plan.
Middle-class suburban supporters of the president take note. It isn’t just the pocketbooks of the “1 percent” he’s after; it’s yours.
Power Line's Paul Mirengoff breaks it down:
... How can Obama “rob the suburbs”? In brief, and to oversimplify, he hopes to accomplish this by conditioning federal grant money on the creation and/or use of “regional” bodies, as opposed to standard governmental units like cities, towns, and counties. The regional bodies would be controlled by a coalition of cities and poorer “inner ring” suburbs and aided by regulations and additional conditions imposed by Washington to the disadvantage of the suburbs. This alliance of Washington and “regional” politicians would push for regional “revenue sharing,” consolidation of school districts, and other measures designed to halt the expansion of suburbs and eventually push people back into the cities.
To get the details, you’ll have to read the book. If you do, and you should, you will learn how Obama has set the stage for this power grab through the work of his “Sustainable Communities” initiative, which is dominated by key figures from the community organizing movement, including Obama’s former community organizing trainer and boss.
But why would Obama risk the eventual alienation of a key portion of his current coalition by “robbing” the suburbs for the benefit of cities? At one level, the answer is straightforward – that’s where the money is. If he wants to redistribute money, suburbs are where to find it. Obama is not willing to alienate suburbanites in his first term, but why not go for it in his second?
But Kurtz shows that something more is at work. Taking another look at Obama’s autobiography, Kurtz finds that the future president’s contempt for the suburbs is a major subtext of Dreams From My Father.
Many of us of a certain age expressed contempt for “the burbs” when we were young (I don’t think any of my other radical views upset my mother, who grew up in a Brooklyn tenement, as much). Most of us outgrew this contempt. But Obama apparently has not. Perhaps that’s because his contempt is tied more to left-wing ideology (the suburbs are to blame for the woes of cities) than to aesthetics. Or maybe his contempt is really directed at the folks who populate the suburbs (we know he looks down on country folk who cling to their guns, etc).
In any event, Kurtz makes a strong case...
Unfortunately, I'm able to illustrate with just a couple of clicks; this is scarey.
First meet the Dot-Gov:
“Suburbs are for sellouts....The city is the moral choice....
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.”
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