Something that disturbed me greatly tonight

[keg in kc]

My fiance and I were driving around tonight looking at potential homes to buy, as we've (or actually, more accurately, she's) just been approved for a mortgage. Some of the homes were in KC, and since neither of us are that familiar with the actual city itself, we weren't too successful at finding where we needed to be. Eventually, we found ourselves on Prospect Avenue. It was not a part of Kansas City I'd ever really seen before, and she had not either. We had both heard rumors, but nothing prepared us for what was really there. It was ugly and I literally felt an air of anger and a sense of violence in the air. There were spray painted messages (stenciled, by the way, and not grafitti) with things like "die pigs" and "black power" periodically. Seriously, I'm not kidding. There were a number of people "congregating" on the street corners, and the entire area looked run-down and delapidated. For lack of a better word, we'd stumbled across KC's ghetto.

Now, just to clarify some things about myself and my fiance, I am, as you may or may not know, a white male, 27 years of age from a small town in West Virginia. My fiance, Tracy, is a black female, 24, from the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. We were both greatly disturbed by what we saw, and were extremely uncomfortable. The question we both asked was "why the hell is there a place like this here?"

That's the question that keeps reverberating through my mind tonight. Why? Why in this country with weath and supposed goodness are there Prospect Avenues? What is it that makes this happen and what can we do to fix it?

Now I'm not naive, I've seen a good bit of the world and I've frequented cities across the country, from NYC to Boston to DC to Miami to LA and San Francisco, and there are places like this in every one. Again, why?

And why do we just accept it?

I'm not talking about welfare, here, and I'm not talking about social services. I'm no so-called liberal that people say wants to throw around hard-earned tax dollars, but my god, something has to be done. Why do these places exist?

I guess I don't have much else to say. I wanted to get this out why I still [i]felt[/i] it and I don't want to cheapen it by making some grand, evangelical diatribe about loving your fellow man, and I don't want to sit down and write some long drawn out treatice. This pissed me off tonight and that's my raw feelings on it. It's wrong that a beautiful city like Kansas City has to have a deep, dark hidden place. Somehow we've got to do better. I just don't know how.

[Luzap]

Thanks Oxford,

You saved me a post with your last responce.

It is amazing the attitude people have about taxes. As little as 65 years ago, a politician couldn't get elected if people even thought he wanted to tax them ~ today we have people clammoring that they're not paying enough.

Luz
can you say 'indoctrinated'?...

[Yosef_Malkovitch]

Lbedrock--

First of all, sorry if I made you think I was making fun of you. That's not my style of argument (belittling those who disagree). I was just a little worked up.

Now, about the taxes. Mayhap I'm not as informed as you seem to be, but I'm pretty sure that writeoffs don't pay you the full value of the asset, only the taxes you would pay on the cash used to buy that asset.

For example. If I'm in the 30% bracket, and I give $100 to a church. I don't get to take $100 off my tax bill, I only get to take 30% of $100, or $30.

If this is correct, then I don't see where the rich would be at an advantage simply because they can write more stuff off. When you write something off, you're pretty much pretending that you never made that money in the first place, no? If I make 50,000 and I write off 25,000 of it, then I am treated as if I made 25,000.

If this is the case, then let the rich write off all they want. With a few exceptions, such as assets for their home "business" that they keep around for write-off purposes only, I don't see that it is that big of a deal.