I think it's a cop-out to say that the problems are the result of the government's priorities. I think the problems are the result of peoples' priorities.
My view is that you can't have functioning, stable societies without strong social ties. And in the U.S. much more so than in Western Europe, those social ties have broken down, especially across racial and socio-economic lines. And when middle and upper class people have no personal investment in the social institutions that lower class people depend on, there is nothing the government can do to fix that.
I'll give you a concrete, personal example. I'm moving to Wilmington, DE because my wife is starting a job there. Wilmington is one of the most dangerous cities in the country, adjusted for population. It's also about 60% African-American, and 25% of the population is below the poverty line. My wife and I have identified one of the few neighborhoods in downtown Wilmington where we'd be willing to live, a new development by the riverfront. The development is literally walled-off from the rest of the city. I-95 divides it from the neighborhoods to the north-west. The Amtrak line, built on a raised stonework viaduct with only a few points of access underneath, separates it from neighborhoods to the north-east. The river and a wildlife refuge separates it from neighborhoods to the south and southeast. None of the people in the city who work for the law firms or the banks, or DuPont, etc, send their kids to the downtown public schools, and as a result have no investment in the quality of those schools (even though its overwhelmingly their tax dollars that fund those schools). The two groups of people live in a city where the downtown core is just a mile across in each direction, and yet somehow live and work in a completely disjoint set of residential areas and workplaces, segregated by race and class.
So tell me how the government is going to fix Wilmington, DE? Or Camden, NJ? Or Baltimore, MD? This is a situation that is replicated all over the country and it's intractable.
> I think it's a cop-out to say that the problems are the result of the government's priorities. I think the problems are the result of peoples' priorities.
Okay.
The problems are a result of peoples' priorities, as implemented through the government.
That doesn't make it any less within the power of government to stop causing problems. The things you point to about social ties are why it is not in the interest of the government (and the people who influence it) to correct the problems, not why it is not within the power of government to do so.
You can't legislate social cohesion. San Francisco, for example, tried. They made it so school assignments were heavily randomized and living in a wealthy neighborhood was no guarantee of your kid going to the local school. And it was a miserable failure of a policy. Instead of taking the chance of little Timmy going to school with 50% Chinese immigrants, families just left the city for the suburbs as soon as they had kids. They abandoned the policy just a couple of years ago.
You certainly can legislate to promote or inhibit social cohesion. (The family-priority structure of much of the US legal immigration system is one example of how you can promote it, and the poorly-aligned-with-demand per-country/per-category quotas and resulting huge immigration delays in legal, family-based categories are an even better example of how you legislate to inhibit it.) There's plenty of examples (on both sides, because US policy is incoherent as regards this goal) in other policy areas besides immigration.
There are some social residence programs that place minorities/lower-class folks in areas with good schools, high average incomes, etc. If I recall correctly (I heard it on NPR a few months ago) the program had varying degrees of success -- some folks just couldn't fit in and opted to go back previous inner-city residences, while some actually saw measurable improvement in quality of life: children doing better in school, improved outlook and satisfaction.
You probably saw the research results of the crack baby studies -- as it turned out poverty plays an incredibly big role in how children grow up [1]. So I really think this is something we need to continue experimenting with. Sadly, these residency programs cost a lot and most communities are unwilling to fund it. So really the first step is convincing people the reality of these things -- e.g., my neighbor, an incredibly smart biomedical engineer, calls advocates of these programs "troublemakers" who want to "bring socialism" into this country.
My view is that you can't have functioning, stable societies without strong social ties. And in the U.S. much more so than in Western Europe, those social ties have broken down, especially across racial and socio-economic lines. And when middle and upper class people have no personal investment in the social institutions that lower class people depend on, there is nothing the government can do to fix that.
I'll give you a concrete, personal example. I'm moving to Wilmington, DE because my wife is starting a job there. Wilmington is one of the most dangerous cities in the country, adjusted for population. It's also about 60% African-American, and 25% of the population is below the poverty line. My wife and I have identified one of the few neighborhoods in downtown Wilmington where we'd be willing to live, a new development by the riverfront. The development is literally walled-off from the rest of the city. I-95 divides it from the neighborhoods to the north-west. The Amtrak line, built on a raised stonework viaduct with only a few points of access underneath, separates it from neighborhoods to the north-east. The river and a wildlife refuge separates it from neighborhoods to the south and southeast. None of the people in the city who work for the law firms or the banks, or DuPont, etc, send their kids to the downtown public schools, and as a result have no investment in the quality of those schools (even though its overwhelmingly their tax dollars that fund those schools). The two groups of people live in a city where the downtown core is just a mile across in each direction, and yet somehow live and work in a completely disjoint set of residential areas and workplaces, segregated by race and class.
So tell me how the government is going to fix Wilmington, DE? Or Camden, NJ? Or Baltimore, MD? This is a situation that is replicated all over the country and it's intractable.