Walter Moore’s Essays
Want To Solve L.A.’s Supposed Budget Crisis? Eliminate $670 Million Per Year In “Welfare For The Rich”
By Walter Moore, Candidate For Mayor Of Los Angeles, WalterMooreForMayor.com
In coming weeks and months, you will read about the City of L.A.’s supposed “budget crisis.” When you do, I want you to remember three little words: “Community Redevelopment Agency.”
That’s the agency that the career politicians at City Hall use to give your money to the billion-dollar development companies that finance their campaigns. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Specifically: $670.8 million per year.
You are taxed to provide subsidies to who make much more money than you do. They, in turn, build housing which is then sold or rented at below-market rates, so people who don’t even live here can get a condo or apartment without having to work and save as hard as you.
October 19, 2007
And get this: the people who get that subsidized, below-market housing don’t even have to be blind or disabled to qualify. They don’t even have to make less money than you do. Yet you are taxed to give money to rich developers to build housing for them.
Does that make any sense to you? If that were a private charity, would you contribute to it? Of course not.
But Mayor Villaraigosa and the City Council would never dream of eliminating the Community Redevelopment Agency, because it’s the quid-pro-quo machine for their campaign contributors.
So now that courts may (finally) invalidate the City’s illegal cell phone tax, City Hall will tell you that, unless you agree to reinstate the tax, they will have to fire police and fire fighters.
If Villaraigosa and the City Council cared about you and how hard you work for your money, they would eliminate the Community Redevelopment Agency, and divert that $670 million per year to something useful, like hiring 3000 more police and cutting your taxes.
But they’re not looking out for you. Why? Because you, my friend, are the middle class: you exist only to pay for the goodies they award to their special interest campaign contributors. To the rich and the career politicians who work for them, you are an ant, a drone, a galley slave. Your quality of life is of no significance.
Now, if you want a Mayor who will look out for your interests, you need take action: contribute today to the Committee to Elect Walter Moore.
