| Sometimes you come across a piece of conservative commentary that is just so ridiculous in its premise, deficient in its analysis, and askew in its conclusions that this time, you just can't look the other way.
This is one of those occurrences.
Buffalo the origin of the socialist welfare state of the USA
Ever ask yourself where the current American welfare system started?
Answer: Buffalo New York 1877.
Well how about that Buffalo has a first, the beginning of something, the inception, the genesis, ready, start, go. Yea let's go Buffalo!!!!!
According to the social workers professional milestones website, this mess started in 1877 Buffalo New York.
(snip)
Everyone with infinite resources has been at the front lines of solving poverty in Buffalo for the last 132 years.
Buffalo must have solved this problem.
So 6 15 2009 how have they done? Let's take a look. Present day Buffalo. Population of Buffalo approx. 300,000 Erie County New York (home of Buffalo) approx 1 million
Approx. one third of the city of Buffalo is on Welfare or some type of public assistance. No this can't this be?
This was written by the creator of Albany's Insanity, Rus Thompson, who according to his blog, is a distant relative of both Presidents Adams, Julius Caesar, and Lady Godiva. I don't mean to pick on Rus- one thing you can say about him is that he isn't owned by anybody, unlike the vast, vast majority of conservative commentators. And I do read his blog now and then because he does catch stories about Albany shenanigans that might otherwise fall through the cracks. Mr. Thompson is one of the guys who was tea-bagging before it was all the rage on Fox News.
But this article just encapsulates the facts-be-damned nature of so much conservative commentary today.
Essentially his argument in this article boils down to: there are a vast array of social services in Buffalo. Buffalo is a poor city. Therefore, the social services have caused the poverty.
This argument is ridiculous on its face. Even if you accept the premise that social services can have such a negative effect on people (which may be true in a small minority of cases, the overblown stereotype of the professional welfare-check-collector who then passes this lifestyle down to the each successive generation), the undisputed history of Buffalo destroys the argument that welfare causes poverty.
As Mr. Thompson points out, The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children was formed in Buffalo by E. T. Gerry in 1877. By Mr. Thompson's hypothesis, things in Buffalo must have gone down the toilet almost immediately, or at least in the next 20 or 30 years as private and government-sponsored welfare programs proliferated. But no! Alas, Buffalo, home to the first organized expression of that dirty, evil trait of human beings, empathy, started an extended economic boom that lasted over 70 years.
In fact, according to Wikipedia:
At the turn of the century, Buffalo was a growing city with a burgeoning economy. Immigrants came from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Poland to work in the steel and grain mills which had taken advantage of the city's critical location at the junction of the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. Hydroelectric power harnessed from nearby Niagara Falls made Buffalo the first American city to have widespread electric lighting yielding it the nickname, the "City of Light". Electricity was used to dramatic effect at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. The Pan-American was also notable for being the scene of the aforementioned assassination of President William McKinley.
Additionally, between the census years of 1880, when Buffalo had just been poisoned by the evil forces of organized empathy, and 1950, when those forces spread throughout Buffalo like a virus, the population of Buffalo increased from 155,134 to 580,132, a growth rate of almost 374%. Buffalo was such a productive industrial city that it actually attracted people who were looking for jobs. And throughout that time, the invisible success stories of social services contributed to successive generations of people who had lives that were better then their parents. These still happen in today's Buffalo, but unfortunately most of them leave Buffalo to find employment elsewhere.
So why is Buffalo actually the economic basket-case it is today? There are several reasons, but these might require just a little too much nuance for your typical conservative to digest and understand. First, there was this little thing called the St. Lawrence Seaway, built in 1957 and which made Buffalo largely useless as a strategic port. And there were the wider nationwide trends of job migration to the sunbelt, suburban flight out of central cities (which was only made possible by a huge government expenditure called the Interstate Highway System which subsidized the suburban lifestyle at the expense of central cities), and the gradual outsourcing of the industrial work that Buffalo and other rust-belt cities thrived on to other parts of the US and the world. If Mr. Thompson is concerned about the real culprit that is gnawing out our state's cities from within, he just might want the Democrats to retain power in the State Senate.
With economic decline a large portion of the population remaining in Buffalo have been the poor, and yes, poor people do tend to attract social services. So please, Mr. Thompson, I would advise you not to confuse correlation with causation. In fact, just look south towards New York City, which was at the forefront of those evil empathists, the settlement house movement, free public education, the New Deal, and all other kinds of social services, yet NYC is the economic capital of the world (but I am not going to make the ridiculous assertion that social services exclusively put NYC in that situation either).
There are serious arguments that can be made about the cost-benefit worthiness of certain types of social services. But to state that having social services available for people who have fallen on their luck destroys cities wholesale is just ridiculous, and requires a blindness to those pesky things that conservatives just can't seem to see, facts. So thank you, Mr. Thompson, for illustrating that so perfectly. |
