Strong Towns – Will Seath
“To put it bluntly, President Obama would like to abolish the suburbs… Moving to a suburb in pursuit of the American dream… looks to Obama and his [community] organizing mentors like selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor.”
So begins Spreading the Wealth by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Written before President Obama’s re-election, Kurtz’s book—whose prose reads like Harold Hill’s pleas to the people of River City in The Music Man—warns that the president’s second term agenda will impose regional tax sharing policies to redistribute suburban tax revenue to city coffers. Such policies, Kurtz argues, will result in a de facto abolition of suburbia, discouraging further sprawl and leading to metropolitan annexations. Whether or not there is merit to Kurtz’s arguments about tax policy, his impassioned rhetoric presents the preservation of suburbia as a self-evident good, inseparable from the American Dream. There is broad popular assent to that position. Suburbia, after all, is right up there with baseball and apple pie in the list of things all-American. Continue Reading…
