DEAR EDITOR:
President Obama intends to help the Democrats in Ohio bail out our state's struggling cities by forcibly transferring suburban tax money to urban coffers through a practice called regionalism.
Regionalism aims to stop the sort of highway and commercial development that brings jobs and taxes to the suburbs. To be completely fair, there are some Republicans who are buying into the idea that regionalism can help solve our state's problems as well. In Obama's own words in a speech in 2007 at Hampton University he boldly proclaimed, "We don't need to build more highways out in the suburbs."
The City of Cleveland has been on board, making a number of attempts to strong-arm its suburbs. For example, in October 2007, the agency that doles out federal highway dollars threatened to veto the construction of an interchange in Avon (the idea being to halt the growth of the affluent suburb) unless it agreed to "share" taxes from businesses that moved near the new road with the inner city.
How would regionalism affect you? Under regionalism, local school districts such as Lakeview, Howland, and Champion would be forced to share their tax levy dollars with the Warren City Schools, thus forcing those smaller districts to lay off staff and cut programs. Under the financial strain that regionalism would place on local governments, those same small communities would likely be forced to cut back on vital police and fire services.
This is another slippery slope the Obama administration is moving us toward. The intent of this practice is redistribution that would begin at the local level and end in a massive global redistribution. The administration's desire to redistribute wealth domestically is part of a larger ideological vision that includes a redistribution of power internationally.
People should say no to Obama and his redistributive ideologies this November.
-- Bev Steinbeck, Warren