On Wednesday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about some of the current budget priorities in Portland, Oregon.
The article reports:
As crime and homelessness strains Portland, Oregon, the city’s liberal mayor has proposed spending more than $10 million on marijuana-related initiatives in the upcoming year, nearly double the amount requested to hire new police officers.
Portland mayor Ted Wheeler (D.) made a point to stress his intention to increase investments in public safety, announcing in early May that he aimed to spend $5.3 million to hire 43 new police officers to better address rising vehicle and retail thefts. What the mayor didn’t publicly stress, however, is that the city will be spending almost twice as much on various marijuana initiatives in the city.
Wheeler’s budget includes a proposal to put $3 million behind an “ongoing” Cannabis Fund and another $7 million behind a “one-time Cannabis Fund.” Of the more than $10 million dedicated to marijuana programs, $2.3 million is earmarked for funding so-called Social Equity and Education Development grants, which disburse funds to rectify “past racially-biased cannabis policies and disparate cannabis-related arrests” and support “Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and women led/owned small business initiatives.”
The article concludes:
The city also allocated $115,200 to hold an “equity summit” for the LGBTQIA+ community, provide community engagement, and train city staff. “Site assessment for My People’s Market,” another initiative, is set to get $137,000 “to fund a site relocation analysis” for “a marketplace aimed at advancing opportunities for BIPOC entrepreneurs.”
Additionally, the city is prepared to shell out $147,339 for a diversity program aimed at “BIPOC, immigrant, and refugee communities” as well as up to $109,512 for a government bureaucrat tasked with “broadening inclusion and diversity” in city government.
What the voters decide to do in their city is their business. However, when it spills over into the state and into the entire country, it is no longer a local issue. The Founding Fathers set up a nation of individual states that were to act as laboratories. Theoretically, when a state enacted a policy that improved the quality of life for its residents, other states would copy that policy. When a policy provide detrimental to a state, that state would abandon the policy and other states would not copy it. The problem today is that when a state has massive problems with overspending and bad governance, the expectation is that the federal government (we, the taxpayers) will bail them out. For a not-so-current example, research the funding of the ‘big dig’ in Boston, Massachusetts. Bad policy impacts all of us eventually.