Violent Crime Went Down in Mass When Mitt Romney Was Gov
That is a simple fact.
Did Romney have something to do with that decline? Who knows. But it is still a fact – crime went down.
It is like the fact that Bush was warned about OBL’s plans to attack America. Easy enough to check.
So why are Mitt Romney and Rudy Guliani fighting about it?
They are because Republicans have bought into this notion that there are no objective (provable) truths. Everything is open to debate. Everything can be spun. Ergo; there is no reality beyond the reality that exists in ones own head. This is a pernicious philosophy that is hurting America and it needs to be rejected everywhere is pops up.
A fact is a fact. Some help your case and some hurt you case – but the ones that hurt your case are still facts.
I’m certainly not an expert on crime BUT I thought at some point in the ’90s crime went down across the nation….due, in part, to smaller population numbers after the ‘Boomers”
The ’90s were a great time to be a Republican governor and take credit for national trends.
I thought Mitt Romney was a governor during the “evil Son of Bush” years. What were you saying about absolute truth and facts? You need to let some of that rub off on your liberal friends.
Great post. I never thought I would see something like that on Delaware Liberal. I could have written it. (oh, no now all of your liberal friends will be watching you. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.)
David, please stop yelling at people for being liberal, don’t you understand that that divide is ficticious? Being conservative does not mean going around the world with good intentions to spread democracy and being liberal does not mean doing the same. Ok? These divides are hangovers from the cold war. The present reality is that we have a truck load of problems that everyone needs to help out and fix. I would be wrong if I did not take ideas especially good ones wherever they come from.
Mitt benefited crimewise from the population trend, but also from the economic boom which allowed him (and Weld before him) to avoid tax increases. Bill Clinton made a lot of Republicans look like geniuses.
Shame Bill was not a genius either. You need to understand the president does not have a whole lot to do with the economy except appointing the chairman of the Federal Reserve who controls the way money is used and printed.
No, the Fed controls only monetary policy. The President (and Congress) controls fiscal policy. Both policies must be optimized together to create a strong economy. There is no “correct” setting for either fiscal or monetary policy – it is very situational. That is why ideology does not make good economics.
This of course is an oversimplification.
What email address should be used to send press releases? You can reply to my email address or post it here.
Thx
Hi Mike,
You may use “editors” at our domain delawareliberal.net.
All these leads to the question of what is the purpose of government? Any takers….
1) establish justice,
2) insure domestic tranquility,
3) provide for the common defense,
4) promote the general welfare, and
5) secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,
How much of this has been accomplished?
http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071126/OPINION11/711260326/1112/OPINION06&GID=pn9/HjWAbZuo+k+ag7hNbrRmkFdmFfoRDgd0r5Ilcug%3D
Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are fighting over who was the better crime fighter, but it’s not a reasonable comparison, because they held different jobs.
Mayor Giuliani and his policies and leadership directly reduced crime in NYC — and that was part of his job. That a mayor can have a negative impact on crime is easily attested to by the Honorable John Street of foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia.
But governors simply have different jobs, and aren’t involved in directly fighting crime — nor should they be. Other than the State Police, police forces are local entities — and state police forces are primarily highway patrol and crime lab providers. Whether the crime rate decreased in Massachusetts does not matter as far as the campaign is concerned, because whether it did or did not, it wasn’t Mr Romney’s function.
And they aren’t running for either governor or mayor; they are running for president, and the president of the United States’ job simply isn’t fighting crime. Most crimes are (and should be) state crimes, something over which the federal government does not (and should not) have jurisdiction.
During Romney’s tenure overall crime fell, but violent crime remained the same as when he took office.
Clinton (Biden’s bill?) put a huge increase of police on American street that Bush then removed. Most of the lowering of crime in the nineties is attributed to the uptick in enforecment officers provided by those federal moniess.
But Nancy also read Steve Leavitt’s Freakonomics, which makes a compelling (and disturbing) case that Roe v Wade actually had a demographic hand in the crime rate drop of the 1990s.