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Stimulus Spending Drastically Helped this Indiana town

O

Objective Voice

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I know the city of Kokomo, IN pretty well. When I lived in Indianapolis several years ago, I would frequently travel through Kokomo, a northern suburb, in order to visit family back home in northern Indiana. Like many small town in the mid-west, Kokomo was steadily going down hill. I was surprised to see the pictures from this article of the city and to learn that their recovery was due in large part to stimulus spending.

Kokomo's revitalization can be viewed as a testiment of what good city planning and government assistance when done right can help lift a city out of dispair.

Good for them!
 
Broken Window Fallacy. Kokomo's growth is the rest of the country's destruction, it's just that the growth in one town is easier to see than the loss over the rest of the country.
 
Still, you have to give props to the Kokomo city planners/local government. They hashed out a plan using federal stimulus funds to do the things that were necessary to make their city more attractive to lure businesses their way (not to mention clean up the town). My hat goes off to them!

The point here though is stimulus money has helped in ways that haven't made national news, but it has been affective...just not in the wide-sweeping ways most had hoped it would.
 

Why should the rest of the country pay for this? Wait thats right this increased the deficit.
 

I agree. I'm also thinking that the government didn't just put it work with unions, which is a wonderful thing.

ptif219 said:
Why should the rest of the country pay for this? Wait thats right this increased the deficit.
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The stimulus money was spent before Kokomo ever spent a nickel of it. Argue the stimulus itself, but don't argue what Kokomo did with the money. Every town should have that foresite.
 

Explain why our grand children in other states should pay for this city?
 

It won't last. It's my experience that city planning departments create very localized, special interests, that in the end kill cities. For instance, instituting maximum parking and density will limit your development. City planning can't match the superiority of spontaneous order in city form.
 
ptif219 said:
Explain why our grand children in other states should pay for this city?
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You are arguing something that the FEDERAL government did -- by allocating money to states for these so-called shovel ready projects. Don't fault Kokomo for getting on the train with everybody else, for heaven's sake.
 

REEEEdickalus! Just exactly what is this experience you have that shows that??
 
MaggieD said:
REEEEdickalus! Just exactly what is this experience you have that shows that??
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Los Angeles. People are fleeing like crazy because we haven't use our gas tax money on road projects like we should, and capping density has created exorbitant home prices in this city. I should mention that Los Angeles has one of the lowest road-miles per capita numbers in the country, thus explaining the traffic. The state raids gas tax money routinely for the general budget, and then a lot of that money also gets wasted on transit projects that don't give a horrible return for the amount spent.
 

Oh, okay. Excuse my REEEdickalosnuss. ;-) You're talking big city. I'm talkin' Kokomo, population -- 46,000. There are wonderful "Main Street Projects" all over the Midwest where tax dollars have been wisely used to rejuvenate a dying downtown area -- making the shops convenient...renovating...yada yada. The largest town I know of who's done a remarkable job is Naperville, Illinois. Their population is 144,000 or so -- as compared to Los Angeles' 3.8 million.
 

I'm just saying that while these things do work in the short term, eventually the problems catch up with them in exorbitant prices and huge traffic. Supply is capped, so growth will have to end at some point too.
 
MaggieD said:
You are arguing something that the FEDERAL government did -- by allocating money to states for these so-called shovel ready projects. Don't fault Kokomo for getting on the train with everybody else, for heaven's sake.
Click to expand...

There were no shovel ready projects Obama admits it.

Obama admits: There WERE no shovel-ready projects | Midwest Voices

In an interview for The New York Times Magazine, President Obama reflects on his presidency and admits that at some point in the stimulus debate, he realized the whole “shovel-ready projects” thing was a myth. Now he tells us.
 
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