Commentary
Mayor-elect Karen Bass certainly seems to have the credentials to get help to improve Los Angeles, that fading City of the Angels. She is a former speaker of the California Assembly and recently has been a powerful member of the U.S. House of Representatives. It also helps outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, likely the next speaker, also hail from this state. And Sen. Dianne Feinstein remains one of the most powerful members of the senior body.
Bass probably will be able to get more money from the federal and state treasuries to try to fix the city’s problems. But her campaign gave no indication she would make the tough choices to pull L.A. out of its “Slough of Despond,” to use a phrase from Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” The main problems:
Crime
Defeated candidate Rick Caruso might have been able to do what another businessman, Mayor Richard Riordan, did in the 1990s and lift up the city with crime and regulation reforms. But Caruso lost.
Bass, combined with continuing District Attorney George Gascón, will allow crime to fester. According to the latest LAPD statistics, there have been 329 homicides so far in 2022, up 15 percent from 2020. Other increases: Robbery is up 16 percent. Aggravated assaults 11 percent. Burglaries 5 percent. But arrests are down 10 percent. And all these numbers are above those in 2020, a year that saw a huge increase from the disturbances that year after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Crosstown reported clothing-store crime is soaring, based on LAPD data, “Los Angeles clothing stores experienced approximately 50–75 monthly crimes from April 2021–February 2022. ... That turned out to be just a way station on a meteoric rise. There were 116 reports in July and 216 clothing store crimes the following month. The total reached 247 in September. ...
“This is not the only post-pandemic retail crime rise that Los Angeles is experiencing. Crosstown recently reported on a surge in shoplifting incidents across the city.”
Homelessness
An estimated 40,000 people now sleep on the city’s streets every night. On her campaign website, the incoming mayor promised, “Karen Bass will bring leadership, accountability and action to dramatically reduce homelessness and end street encampments in Los Angeles.”Her program:
She will lead with a comprehensive approach, beginning with aggressive emergency action to:None of that is likely to help much. Although housing is becoming slightly more affordable because of the recession now beginning, it still remains prohibitively high for too many. The state is unlikely to reform such burdensome regulations as the California Environmental Quality Act to cut the cost of building new housing. Nor will laws be changed to compel the homeless, many of whom just like living on the street, to go in for treatment.
- House 15,000 people by the end of year one
- Dramatically reduce street homelessness
- End street encampments
- Lead on mental health and substance abuse treatment
Taxes
On Nov. 8, city voters passed Measure ULA, another increase in property taxes. Almost every election cycle the city increases one tax or another. In 2020, Measure RR increased property taxes for school bonds. In 2018, Measure W increased parcel taxes for flood-control projects.The main problem for businesses and residents isn’t the high taxes, which are bad enough, but the unpredictability of future tax rates. People need financial certainty in their lives or they leave to find it somewhere else.
Opportunity
For a century and more people have come to Los Angeles to thrive in a highly competitive, free environment. Unfortunately, here is Bass’s vision from her campaign website: “A Bass administration will promote equitable, pro-growth policies that support L.A.’s small businesses and key industries—because it’s the only way we’ll tackle income inequality and our city’s affordability crisis.”“Equitable” and “income inequality” are socialist euphemisms for central planning. They’re “pro-growth” only for government bureaucracies. L.A. is the most diverse place on the planet. The Los Angeles Unified School District estimates 94 languages other than English are spoken by its students. To make all 4 million people in the city exactly the same would require a Stalinist level of brutality.
Liberals like Bass just don’t get it. The only way such a diverse set of people can get along is if they’re left alone, not hyper-regulated. Otherwise you just set up a racial and ethnic spoils system, with all against all. Equality of opportunity should be the goal, not equality of result.
Population
For the first time in its history, people are fleeing Los Angeles. L.A. County lost an estimated 160,000 in 2021. Not a large amount—yet. But the city and county still sport large undeveloped areas. And the weather still is wonderful. It’s hard to repel people from what in many respects remains one of the most desirable places on earth.Businesses are also fleeing. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, of all American counties, “From 2018 to 2021, only Los Angeles County saw more companies take flight, with 80 departures, than from San Francisco, which lost 52 headquarters.”
Conclusion
It’s so sad. I was born in Detroit in 1955, when it was called the Paris of the West, with a population of 1.8 million. As I grew up in a nearby suburb, Detroit declined by two-thirds to a current population of 632,434. The cause was the same bad political management we’ve seen in L.A. the past several decades. Motown’s mayors made promises similar to those of Karen Bass. But nothing got fixed.Los Angeles won’t get nearly as bad as Detroit because of its location and the weather. But living now in Orange County, I’m watching another major city near me suffer from the same policies that always fail.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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