Editorial voices from elsewhere
Editorial voices from newspapers around the country as compiled by the Associated Press:
Awful policy-making streams from Washington, D.C., like water down slippery rocks these days.
But special mention is due the proposal to raid blight funding for cities like Detroit to shore up the nearly broke national highway trust fund.
Name just about any old industrial city and they’ve got a problem with abandoned houses. Most of the money to tear them down comes from federal Hardest Hit Fund, but a deal proposed recently to get a six-year transportation bill funded would have sacrificed money allocated for this year that has yet to be spent.
It was a farcical plan to paper over one form of disinvestment – Congress’ long-time political inability to raise the gas tax to properly fund roads. The idea could resurface in the fall, though, unless Congress finds an alternative source for the money.
But there’s a more substantive irony to what the Senate tried to do.
Why do we even need blight funds in cities like Detroit? Why did the city have, at the height of the problem, 70,000 abandoned homes and more than a dozen square miles of emptiness?
Well, those things are, themselves, largely the product of tragic federal policy-making.
Start with the building of the many highways that devastated city neighborhoods and made it easier for people to live miles from the city’s core. Housing policy helped, too, in the form of massive subsidies for the building of suburban houses and subdivisions.
Deindustrialization, fueled in part by federal trade policies and other economic policies, also destroyed the manufacturing base that built Detroit and made middle-class life possible for city families.
And all of those policies, of course, were also tinged by racism – blacks were left out, by federal policy, from the initial move to the suburbs – that helped create the economic isolation experienced by poor blacks in neighborhoods that, yes, now grapple with insurmountable blight.
Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who killed a beloved and protected lion in Zimbabwe last month, ruined his reputation and closed his practice. He should lose something else: his freedom.
It’s unclear whether the big-game hunter who broke the law on a past hunt can be prosecuted for killing Cecil, a 13-year-old lion that was being studied by Oxford University researchers and lived in a wildlife sanctuary. But Americans who use dubious means to bag imperiled animals in other countries deserve jail time.
Palmer admitted hunting and killing Cecil, but he claimed he did not know the animal was a much-photographed favorite of visitors to Hwange National Park.
The United States needs a clear and tough statute to prohibit Americans from hunting protected animals in any country.
On the same day Medicare turned 50 – AARP-eligible – a study predicted health care costs will rise in the next few years as a result of expanded insurance coverage, rising demand and an aging population.
The good news is, Congress willing, Medicare will be there for them – and for the rest of us. That wasn’t always the case.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law July 30, 1965, roughly half of Americans 65 and older had no health insurance. Fifty years later, virtually all seniors have coverage, a far higher rate than for younger people.
Of course, over the years, medical science changed and, with it, so has Medicare.
While some of the task of administering Medicare is now in private hands, through programs like Medicare Advantage, we’d guess traditional Medicare, like the Veterans Administration’s medical system, could use the services of a top efficiency expert. Both federal systems are as enormous as they are essential, and we owe it to those who use them to make them as effective as possible – not just for boomers, but to ensure that these programs are there for their children and grandchildren as well.