Rich Lowry on Baltimore

“Obama doesn't have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall...Baltimore itself. The city hasn't been 'neglected'. It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought fully into the big-government vision of the 1960s, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence, and despair...The Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable; because most of the Baltimore government is that way. This is a failure exclusively of Democrats.”

“Baltimore is a high-tax city, with malice aforethought... Developers need to be lured to the city with subsidies, and the developers, in turn, contribute to politicians to stay in their good graces. This makes for fertile ground for the city’s traditional corruption... Baltimore's preferred driver of growth has been government... Baltimore has the fifth-highest murder rate among cities with a population of 100,000 or more. The schools, predictably, are a disaster, run by and for the teachers unions... The imperative in Baltimore should be to think and act anew. But the Left's takeaway will be that there's an urgent need for more of the same, as Baltimore and places like it continue to rot.”