Ihateregistering1 said:
"He almost certainly lives outside St. Louis in a white suburb."
Baseless assumption.
Not an assumption, an inference. The probability of a middle class libertarian living outside the inner city is quite high, whereas the probability of you being mugged by any random minority you happen to see is exceedingly low.
Ihateregistering1 said:
Oh, and I lived in Atlanta for 18 years.
Cool, then I'm sure you know Atlanta is absolutely an amazing city to live in and undergoing rapid development and renewal. Have you visited the Beltline yet?
Ihateregistering1 said:
I didn't say anything about states, I was talking about cities, and the cities with the highest murder rates are almost universally democratically controlled and have been for decades, regardless of the political leanings of the state legislature (Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Detroit, Oakland, Stockton, Washington D.C., etc.) Much of that funding you mentioned above is controlled by city and county Governments, not state legislature.
Actually, a great deal of education and transportation is funded by the state, and the war on drugs is largely a federal issue. Gun control on a local level is meaningless without strong measures at the state and federal level, and poverty, perhaps the biggest cause of crime, cannot be tackled on the local level alone.
The fear-mongering about inner-city crime is largely driven by the media that runs on "if it bleeds, it leads" stories to drive ratings. In truth, crime is at an all time low in American cities. Oddly enough, crime in suburbia is rising.
I'm really not interested in Dem vs. Republican cheerleading (although, there is no statistical correlation between high crime and Democratic mayoralty). My primary concern is the health of American cities, which are the cultural and economic backbone of America. 3% of the land mass in the United States generates 90% of the GDP and 86% of jobs. The Chicago metropolitan area alone generates 546.8B each year in economic output, greater than that of 42 states in the US. The history of all civilizations--their rise and fall--can be traced along the growth and decline of their cities, and cities depend on state investment in transportation, infrastructure, schools, health, housing, and countless other services. Providing access to the internet is simply not a luxury in the 21st century, and if we want to live in a civilization that values technological and urban progress, we need to acknowledge this.
Ihateregistering1 said:
And the links are in the articles, but if you insist:
http://usaspending.gov/state-summary-tabular?fromfiscal=yes&fiscal_year=all&tab=By+Location&tabletype=statesummary
That merely tells you spending by state; it doesn't account for state contributions to GDP and federal taxes.
Ihateregistering1 said:
Unsubstantiated claims regarding diversity in the south? You mean the ones talked about in this other article I posted earlier?:
http://www.economist.com/node/21547270
Most of the diversity in the South is confined to cities, certainly not at the state level. Your source even confirms this: "The Urban Institute, a Washington, DC, think-tank, recently compiled a report card on a range of measures of racial and ethnic equity in the country's 100 biggest metropolitan areas. The ten best cities for black-white equity are mostly in the South and in the West, while the ten worst are in the north-east and in the Midwest."
That's really all it says about minority integration in the South, it doesn't go into greater detail. Granted, one can find low-diversity in many affluent parts of New England and the West Coast, but these are not areas I would hold up as models for vibrant cultural and economic centers.
