It is hard to overstate how seriously the City of St. Louis appears to be leaning into just giving other people’s money away. I’m sure I’ll be mocked for stating that it appears the goal of city leaders is to remove the last vestiges of personal responsibility for lower-income city residents and put everyone on the dole, but a quick review of recent policy decisions at city hall leads me to that conclusion.
Let’s recap. In 2015, the city passed its ridiculous source-of-income rule that requires landlords in the city to accept housing vouchers. Keep in mind that most housing vouchers involve the Section 8 program, where participation is voluntary. But in the city, and in four other towns in Missouri, you are required to participate.
The other actions are all more recent. In recent months, city leaders have:
- Passed a program to fund lawyers for people subject to evictions. This program will use tax dollars to take sides in civil matters between landlords and tenants. So not only is the city requiring landlords to accept vouchers, but it is also using public money to prevent those landlords from evicting people not paying rent at all.
- Created a pilot program to institute a guaranteed income program in the city for families with kids in public schools. Basically, this means the city is sending people money to use as they please, with no oversight or requirements. (Yes, I am familiar with the libertarian arguments for guaranteed incomes, but that idea is to replace existing welfare programs with a guaranteed income.)
- Instituted the newest, smallest, and probably most absurd program of them all to loan drivers money to register their cars. Let’s be clear—this is taking tax dollars from taxpayers to “loan” to other people to pay their taxes, in this case the sales tax on their cars. If they haven’t paid their sales tax and registered their vehicle, what makes one think they will a) repay the loan, b) get insurance, or c) renew their tags later? This is nothing more than subsidizing the purchase of a car for people who should be buying less expensive cars to start with (or not buying them at all).
- Passed a bill to repay certain resident’s medical debts, a process which, in the large majority of cases, has absolutely nothing to do with city government. (Cancelling debts owed to the city’s own health department is something I can understand.) It is just taking tax dollars and giving them away to favored groups.
The only silver lining to all of this is that the current city leadership is so poor at municipal administration that these programs are only going to “help” a small number of people. It’s almost as if the political message behind them is more important than the programs themselves. (In these cases, that is a good thing.)
This expansion of the local welfare state is the last thing St. Louis needs to turn itself around.
