Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor The Sun Sentinel

April 8, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

500 E. Broward Blvd

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33394

RE: “Affordable housing”. The subject of your editorial this morning is yet more proof that God’s ‘sense of mirth’ is divinely inspired. Indeed, it may soon rank as the 6yh proof of God’s existence.

Ms. O,

I’ll say this for modern American Liberals. They never let you down. It makes no difference what their mission is: grievance counseling, polar bear undrowning coalitions, editorial page editors, “fairness” monitors, making quotas and goals antonyms, having a Final Four without keeping score, making quinoa and kale taste like crème brulee, keeners of deplorable Republican mean-spiritedness, convincing Americans of good will why taking down a statue of a defeated Confederate soldier is not the same as the Taliban blowing up a 2,3000 year old Buddha, why a murdering Islamic terrorist would not have become a murdering Islamic terrorist if he had a good job, one with good pay and benefits, how to have a nation without borders, advanced horizon trekking, explaining why NPR is not politically and culturally biased…God’s Holy Trousers but the list is endless.

But when your intellectual forebears lined up on the left side of the tennis court when Robespierre called the role no list is too big or too daunting. One of the reasons Senator Lard Kennedy could end his concession speech in 1980 in Madison Square Garden by saying “the dream never dies” and bring the of “hope triumphing over experience” Democrats to their feet in tears is because results don’t count, only expectations. Because there is no posting of final grades, because there are no final exams, “the dream never dies”. Thus, the never-ending War on Poverty enters its 54^th year of raising the minimum wage as the one sure path to ending poverty. Maybe. Who cares if it works? It’s “fair”, isn’t it?

Speaking of “fairness”, you say

“A better alternative, though, would be to pay teachers

what they’re wo they can live where they want.”

Today 

You 

Pick one. It’s is either the sound of the other shoe whistling past your ear or the gurgling sound the turd in the punch bowl makes when it plops up when someone is offering a toast to the road to Hell being unpaved but soon to be black-topped with skid-proof good intentions. Here is the conundrum your fallacious argument presents us with. [A tip of my DWEM hat to the Trivium is demanded]

If Abdul and Juanita can’t read why will paying their present instructors more money help them read?

 Put differently, a bunch of golfers from all over the world are chasing a little white ball around rural Georgia in a place whose grounds and grass are as well-kept as Arlington Cemetery. Years of dedication and competition will give one of them a highly coveted green jacket and a sack filled with green Benjamins. It’s why, as the legendary Big Mike from Bayonne, noted sportsman, saloonkeeper, and now a dedicated public servant, still says, “you never see anyone swimming to Cuba”.

If the long-held belief that spending more money on education means that students will be better taught why did Obama, Clinton, and Gore send their kids to schools so expensive that I could have bought my first home times 2 for their tuitions? Let the record show that I and my children went to private schools.

If $ spent per student is the one true road to educational success why doesn’t the really fine DC school system graduate 2 or 3 Nobel Prize winners each year?

Speaking of, as you say, “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, a bit of remedial homework is in order. It was the original Doctor J, Samuel Johnson, who said “Any public policy that involves robbing Peter to pay Paul will always have Paul’s support”. Thus, when modern American Liberals are clamoring for open borders, they are not necessarily overflowing with non-denominational charity. They are putting future voters into their perpetually sealed lock-box.

As Orwell said, “It is important to focus what is at the end of one’s nose.”

Is there anyone in your slightly addle-brained aerie of scribes who believes that somebody in Tallahassee can do something that requires half plus one of those present voting in the affirmative that will make housing more “affordable”? Midnight Basketball? Maybe. Abolishing teen-age bullying and the heartbreak of psoriasis? Maybe. Affordable housing? Never. 

The country has been trying since 1936 to make housing affordably accessible. I suggest that the evidence of your own eyes, available at the end of your nose, is, regardless of the reason[s], overwhelming. It is neither.

I spent a big chunk of my other life in the housing business., being an expert witness on Federally secured or guaranteed mortgages on the Federal Court level. I know you don’t know anyone who is a tenant in a Section 8 apartment but see if you can find or hear of anyone who sought out a Section 8 apartment.

The Sadowski Trust Fund is worthy of mention. It is supposed to be an amulet that will provide clean affordable housing for those “unlucky in life’s lottery”. Well intended, and aren’t they all? – vide Dante – it was the cookie jar that rotten Republicans and flummoxed Democrats constantly raided. 

It is owed to the ledger to state the original trust fund raid was led by Lyndon Baines Johnson, AKA “Landslide Lyndon”, in 1964. He was aided and abetted in this by willing Republicans who would get to plop their snouts into this newly discovered public trough. The trust fund was Social Security. The “lock box”, the one so assiduously guarded by Vice President Alpha Gump during the thrill-packed 2000 campaign, would, if found, contain nothing but markers from last year’s Secretary of the Treasury promising to pay this year’s annuitants from next year’s receipts, maybe. Look it up.

The longer it takes you to get to work the cheaper will be your cost of housing. Nothing that can be done in Tallahassee will change that. Honest Injun.

Kevin Smith

CC – MP, DS