The editorial, “How to help Baltimore” (June 3), provides the same failed ideas to fix Baltimore City, namely more state funding for the city. In fact, now is the time to finally hold Baltimore’s feet to the fire.
The city already receives nearly $1 billion a year from the state, most of which reinforces the bad behavior of too many of its residents. The city is among the nation’s leaders in drug abuse, violent crime, venereal disease and out-of-wedlock births. It is this latter problem that drives all of the other social ills.
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation is a leading expert on welfare and poverty in the U.S. He has proven conclusively that high out-of-wedlock birth rates (Baltimore’s rate is over 70 percent) cause the violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, and rampant poverty and illiteracy that plague Baltimore. However, he concludes that if government would stop paying women and girls to have these babies (stop subsidizing them), there would be considerably fewer of them.
Once this happens, everything else in the city would improve with Baltimore going from a third world city to one that can start to attract new business and residents. Baltimore would then become a model for the rest of the country. The savings are endless — less spent on police, health care, prisons, courts, Medicaid, schools, hospitals, special education and many other areas.
Ray Gordon, Bel Air
