Obama's 2nd term plan - destroy the suburbs to pay for the Cities

[Soul Crusher]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/08/13/how-obama-is-robbing-the-suburbs-to-pay-for-the-cities

How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Stanley Kurtz





Political experts left and right agree: the coming election will be decided by America’s suburbanites.  From Florida to Virginia on across the country, in every battleground state, they are the key demographic. All of which raises a question that has not been considered as yet, and ought to be: is President Obama’s re-election in the suburbanites’ interest?  The answer emphatically is no.

As many Americans do not know, in the eyes of the leftist community organizers who trained Obama, suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor.  Obama adopted this view early on, and he has never wavered from this ideological commitment, as a review of his actions in office goes to show.

President Obama’s plans for a second-term include an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities.  It’s a transformative idea, and deserves to be fully aired before the election.  But like a lot of his major progressive policy innovations, Obama has advanced this one stealthily–mostly through rule-making, appointment, and vague directives.  Obama has worked on this project in collaboration with Mike Kruglik, one of his original community organizing mentors.  Kruglik’s new group, Building One America, advocates “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs.  Kruglik’s group also favors a raft of policies designed to coerce people out of their cars and force suburbanites (with their tax money) back into densely packed cities.

Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to Kruglik’s efforts.  A federal program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the country with “regional equity” and “smart growth” as goals.  These are, of course, code words.  “Regional equity” means that, by their mere existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities.  It means, “Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor. “Smart growth” means, “Quit building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit can shuttle you between your 800 square foot apartment in an urban tower and your downtown job.” In all likelihood, these planning commissions will issue “recommendations” which Obama would quickly turn into requirements for further federal aid.  In fact, his administration has already used these tactics to impose federal education requirements on reluctant states.  Indeed, part of Obama’s assault on the suburbs is his effort to undercut the autonomy of suburban school districts.

Suburbs are for sellouts:  That is a large and overlooked theme of Obama’s famous memoir, Dreams from My Father.  Few have noticed the little digs at suburban “sprawl” throughout the book, as when Obama decries a Waikiki jammed with “subdivisions marching relentlessly into every fold of green hill.”  Dreams actually begins with the tale of an African American couple who’ve come to question their move from city to suburb – the implication clearly being that the city is the moral choice.

Early on in Dreams, Obama tells of how his mother and Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetoro, were pulled apart by a proxy version of the American dream.  Lolo got a job with an American oil company, bought a house in a better neighborhood, and started dining at the company club.  Obama’s mother, who had come to Indonesia in search of Third World authenticity, wanted nothing to do with the “ugly American” types who frequented this new world, and she taught her son to disdain them as well.  From Obama’s perspective, American-inspired upward mobility had broken his new family in two.

Back in Hawaii after his Indonesian interlude, Obama came to see his grandparents as strangers.  The realization dawned as they drove him along a sprawl-filled highway.  Obama then threw in his lot with an African-American mentor named Frank Marshall Davis, who lived in a ramshackle pocket of the city called the “Waikiki Jungle” where his home was a gathering place for young leftists and nonconformists.  Rejecting assimilation into America’s middle-class, Davis hit on socialist politics and identification with the urban poor as the way to establish his racial credentials.

Dreams from My Father describes Davis’s efforts to pass this stance on to Obama.  At Occidental, with Davis’s advice in mind, Obama worried that he was too much like “suburban blacks, students who sit with whites in the cafeteria and refuse to be defined by the color of their skin.”  This fear of becoming a middle-class suburban “sellout” is the background to the famous passage of Dreams where Obama explains why he started hanging out with “Marxist professors” and other unconventional types.  Recalling Davis’s admonition to reject the standard path to success, “the American way and all that shit,” Obama left Occidental’s suburban campus for Columbia University, “in the heart of a true city.”

After leaving New York for Chicago, Obama met up with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  This relationship, too, reflected Obama’s ideological disdain for the suburbs. Obama was distressed, for example, to learn that one of Wright’s assistants planned to move to a suburb for her son’s safety.  After confronting Wright with concerns that his congregation was “too upwardly mobile,” Obama was mollified to discover the congregation’s official “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.”  The years with Rev. Wright helped Obama solidify the solution to his identity crisis that Frank Marshall Davis had taught him long before: reject the lure of the middle-class suburbia and identify instead with the urban poor.

 Simultaneously, Obama joined up with a clutch of leftist community organizers who attributed the troubles of Chicago’s inner cities to the very existence of suburbs.  Among this early group of mentors, Obama was personally closest to Mike Kruglik.  Kruglik and his fellow organizers noticed that even when their groups succeeded in forcing some local politician to increase government spending, neighborhood conditions failed to improve.  Instead of drawing the lesson that big government doesn’t work, Kruglik and his fellow organizers seized upon a different explanation.  They discovered the work of Myron Orfield and David Rusk, national leaders of the fight against suburban “sprawl” — and sponsors of a bold plan to redistribute suburban tax money to the cities.

Orfield and Rusk attributed urban decline to taxpayer “flight” to the suburbs.  In their eyes, compulsory redistribution of suburban tax money to cities was the only lasting solution to urban decay.  Kruglik and Obama’s other community organizing mentors embraced these ideas and have crusaded for them ever since.  From his position on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama supported his mentors’ anti-suburban activism for years.  Likewise, from the time he entered the Illinois State Senate right through to his service in the U.S. Senate, Obama continued to work closely with Kruglik on his anti-suburban crusade.

To this day, Obama quietly coordinates his administration’s policies on urban/suburban issues with Kruglik, Orfield, and Rusk.  Kruglik’s anti-suburban battle is set to become one of the defining themes of Obama’s second term.  Although calls for “regional tax-base sharing” will strike the public as something entirely new, the program is the fulfillment of the president’s lifetime ambition.  Still trying to avoid being mistaken for a middle-class, suburban “sellout,” Obama has hit upon the ultimate solution: a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to America’s cities.

That would not be in the interests of America’s suburbanites or, ultimately, anyone else.  Redistribution kills the growth that benefits everyone.  Once voters realize that there has never been a president more ideologically opposed to the suburbs, or more reliant on redistribution as a policy, they should know what to do – especially all those suburbanites on whose judgment the election itself will turn.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of the new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 This article is available online at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/08/13/how-obama-is-robbing-the-suburbs-to-pay-for-the-cities


 

[Soul Crusher]

[Kazan]

Yeah there's a good idea

[Soul Crusher]

Yeah there's a good idea

Obama is already on record as saying executives live in the suburbs so they dont have to pay taxes to fund inner city blacks.   It was in a 1995 interview he gave. 

[Kazan]

Obama is already on record as saying executives live in the suburbs so they dont have to pay taxes to fund inner city blacks.   It was in a 1995 interview he gave. 

I live in IL, I have had to deal with these fuckheads my whole life. Always looking for a hand out or a way to steal from the productive to give to the lazy.

[blacken700]

you should be happy, the slums, the place you call home is going to get money  

[Kazan]

you should be happy, the slums, the place you call home is going to get money  

Fuck you, I work for a living.....

[blacken700]

Fuck you, I work for a living.....

that's for 333386,unless you live in the slums too 

[Soul Crusher]

that's for 333386,unless you live in the slums too 

I dont want my neighbors in Westchester  looted by a ghetto thief like obama to pay for more welfare. 


FU 

[MCWAY]

Obama is already on record as saying executives live in the suburbs so they dont have to pay taxes to fund inner city blacks.   It was in a 1995 interview he gave. 

I moved to the suburbs, because I actually like sitting on my couch and not the floor, worrying about being picked off by a stray bullet living in the hood.

Or, as Chris Rock put it (in response to some black people that it's the media that makes some ignorant black folks look bad), "When I go the money machine tonight, I'm not looking over my back for the media; I'm looking for N&@^$Z!! Ted Koppel ain't never took s^#t from me; N&@^*Z HAVE!!!"

[Soul Crusher]

Stanley Kurtz's new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities describes political forces closely tied to President Obama who have pursued an agenda to destroy the suburbs for many years. He expresses concern that a second Obama term will be marked by an intensification of efforts to destroy the suburbs through eviscerating their independence thought the imposition of "regionalism". The threat, however, long predates the Obama administration and has, at least in some cases, been supported by Republicans as well as by Democrats.

America is a suburban nation. Nearly three-quarters of the residents of major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) live in suburbs, most in smaller local government jurisdictions. Further, outside the largest metropolitan areas most people live in suburbs, smaller towns or smaller local government jurisdictions.
 
Smart Growth
 
The anti-suburban agenda has more than one dimension. The best known is smart growth, known by a variety of labels, such as compact development, growth management, urban consolidation, etc. Smart growth, from our research, also is associated with higher housing prices, a lower standard of living, greater traffic congestion and health threats from more intense local air pollution.

Regionalism
 
Another, less well-known anti-suburban strategy is regionalism, to which Kurtz grants considerable attention. Regionalism includes two principal strains, local government amalgamation and metropolitan tax sharing. Both of these strategies are aimed at transferring tax funding from suburban local governments to larger core area governments.

Social welfare and differing income levels are not an issue at this level of government. Local governments, cities, towns, villages, boroughs and townships, finance local services principally with their own local taxes. The programs aimed at social welfare or providing income support are generally administered and financed at the federal, state or regional (county) level. Any suggestion that local suburban jurisdictions are subsidized by core local governments simply reveals a basic unfamiliarity with US municipal finance.
 
Local Government Amalgamation
 
Opponents of the suburbs have long favored amalgamating local governments (such as cities, towns, villages, boroughs and townships). There are two principal justifications. One suggests "economies of scale" --- the idea that larger local government jurisdictions are more efficient than smaller governments, and that, as a result, taxpayers will save. The second justification infers that a larger tax base, including former suburbs, will make additional money available to former core cities, which are routinely characterized as having insufficient revenues to pay for their services. Both rationales are without foundation.
 
Proponents of amalgamation incessantly refer to the large number of local governments in some states, implying that this is less efficient. The late Elinor Ostrum put that illusion to rest in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009:
 

Scholars criticized the number of government agencies rather than trying to understand why created and how they performed. Maps showing many governments in a metropolitan area were used as evidence for the need to consolidate.
 

The reality is that there is a single measure of efficiency: spending per capita. Here there is a strong relationship between smaller local government units and lower taxes and spending. Our review of local government finances in four states (Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana and Illinois) indicates that larger local governments tend to be  less efficient, not more. Moreover, the same smaller is more efficient dynamic is evident in both metropolitan areas as well as outside. "Smaller is better" is also evident at the national level (Figure 1).



Yet the "bigger is better" faith in local government amalgamation remains compelling to many from   both the Right and Left. Proponents claim that smaller local governments are obsolete, characterizing them as being from the horse-and-buggy era. The same logic could be used to eliminate county and even state governments. However, democracy remains a timeless value. If people lose control of their governments to special interests (which rarely, if ever, lobby for less spending), then democracy is lost, though the word will still be invoked.

Support of local government amalgamation arises from a misunderstanding of economics, politics and incentives (or perhaps worse, contempt for citizen control). When two jurisdictions merge, everything is leveled up, from labor costs to service levels. The labor contracts, for example, will reflect the wage, benefit and time off characteristics of the more expensive community, as the Toronto "megacity" learned to its detriment.

Further, special interests have more power in larger jurisdictions, not least because they are needed to finance the election campaigns of elected officials, who always want to win the next election. They are also far more able to attend meetings – sending paid representatives – than local groups. This is particularly true the larger the metropolitan area covered, since meeting are usually held in the core of urban area not in areas further on the periphery. This greater influence to organized and well-funded special interests – such as big real estate developers, environmental groups, public employee unions – and drains the influence of the local grassroots. The result is that voters have less influence and that they can lose financial control of larger local governments. The only economies of scale in larger local government benefit lobbyists and special interests, not taxpayers or residents.
 
Regional Tax Sharing
 
Usually stymied by the electorate in their attempts to amalgamate local governments, regional proponents often make municipal tax sharing a priority. The idea is that suburban jurisdictions should send some of their tax money to the core jurisdictions to make up for the claimed financial shortages of older cities. Yet this ignores the fact, as Figure 1 indicates, that larger jurisdictions generally spend more per capita already and generally tax more, as our state reports cited above indicate. Larger jurisdictions also tend to receive more in state and federal aid per capita.  A principal reason is that the labor costs tend to be materially higher in larger jurisdictions. In addition to paying well above market employee compensation, many larger jurisdictions have burdened themselves with pension liabilities and post employment health benefits that are well above what their constituencies can afford. The regionalist solution is not to bring core government costs in line with suburban levels but force the periphery to help subsidize their out of control costs.

Howard Husock, of Harvard University's JFK School of Government (now at the Manhattan Institute) and I were asked to evaluate a tax sharing a plan put forward by former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk for Kalamazoo County, Michigan (The Kalamazoo Compact) more than a decade ago. Our report (Keeping Kalamazoo Competitive)found no justification for the suburban areas and townships of Kalamazoo County to share their tax bases with the core city of Kalamazoo. The city already spent substantially more per capita, received more state aid per capita and had failed to take advantage of opportunities to improve its efficiency (that is, lower the costs of service without reducing services).  We concluded that the "struggling" core city had a spending problem, not a revenue problem. To the credit of the electorate of Kalamazoo County, the tax sharing proposal is gathering dust, having been made impractical by suburban resistance.
 
Spreading the Financial Irresponsibility
 
The wanton spending that has gotten many larger core jurisdictions into trouble should not have occurred. The core cities are often struggling because their political leadership has "given away the store," behavior that does not warrant rewarding. Elected officials in the larger jurisdictions had no business, for example, allowing labor costs to become higher than necessary or granting rich pension benefits paid for by private sector employees (taxpayers), most of whom  enjoy only  much more modest pension programs, if at all (See note below).
 
The voters are no match for the spending interests with more efficient access to City Hall. The incentives in such larger jurisdictions are skewed against fiscal responsibility and the interests of taxpayers. Making an even larger pool of tax revenues available can only make things worse.
 
At the same time, the smaller, suburban jurisdictions around the nation are often the bright spot in an environment of excessive federal, state and larger municipal government spending. Their governments, close to the people, are the only defense against the kind of beggar-the-kids-future spending that has already captured the federal government, state governments and some larger local jurisdictions.

Either Way the Threat is Very Real
 
Even if President Obama is not re-elected or if a second Obama Administration does not pursue the anti-suburban agenda, the threat to the suburbs will remain very real. This is not just about the suburbs, and it is certainly not some secret conspiracy. What opposing regionalism means is the preservation of what is often the last vestige of fiscal responsibility. It is not that the elected officials in smaller  jurisdictions are better or that the electorate is better. The superior performance stems from the reality that smaller governments are closer to the people, and decision-making tends more to reflect their interests more faithfully than in a larger jurisdictions.
 
------
 
Note: A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts (Promises with a Price) indicated that "... in general, the private sector never offered the level of benefits that have been traditionally available in the public sector." The report further indicated that 90 percent of state and local government retirees are covered by the more expensive defined benefit pension programs, compared to 20 percent in the private sector. The median annual pension in the state and local government sector was cited at 130 percent higher than in the private sector. While 82 percent of state and local government retirees are covered by post-employment medical benefits, the figure is 33 percent in the private sector. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after accounting for the one-third higher wages per hour worked among state and local government workers, employer contribution to retirement and savings is 160 percent higher than in the private sector (March 2012). A just published Pew Center on the States report (The Widening Gap Update) indicates that states are $1.3 trillion short of the funding required to pay the pension and post employment medical benefits of employees. This does not include programs administered by local governments.
 
Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”
 
Lead Photo: Damascus City Hall (Portland, Oregon metropolitan area) by Wiki Commons user Tedder.


http://www.newgeography.com/content/003044-regionalism-spreading-fiscal-irresponsibility

[Straw Man]

Hey 333 - Obamas plan for destroying your mind seems to have worked pretty well

[Soul Crusher]

Hey 333 - Obamas plan for destroying your mind seems to have worked pretty well

LOL - nice way to refute your lord messiahs plan to collapse the nation. 

Well on his way - people suffering worse under the gay muslim communist bath house attendant than the Bush recession. 

[Straw Man]

LOL - nice way to refute your lord messiahs plan to collapse the nation. 

Well on his way - people suffering worse under the gay muslim communist bath house attendant than the Bush recession. 

your belief that he wants to collapse the nation is evidence that he's successfully destroyed your mind although to be fair there wasn't much to destroy to begin with

[andreisdaman]

your belief that he wants to collapse the nation is evidence that he's successfully destroyed your mind although to be fair there wasn't much to destroy to begin with

X2......funny that when the Republicans were destroying the cities through defunding to support the suburbs no one said anything

[JBGRAY]

It's fine to live in the city....just not in the immediate areas around them which houses some of the most brutal ghettos.  Miami is a gorgeous city.  I absolutely love it and nearly bought a condominium right near the American Airlines arena when the housing market collapsed.  However, you take a wrong turn or two and you'll find yourself in Liberty City or Overtown.  The only "suburbanite-level" income people living in cities are living in high rise condos which have a myriad of security features.

People live in the suburbs because they do not want to live next to the animals.  As soon as blacks start moving in, everyone else begins moving out.  It is going to take a LOT more than a few legislative policies to attempt to get the more civilized of us to move shoulder to shoulder with the welfare raiders.

[Soul Crusher]

Just got back from 2016 - makes perfect sense now why Obama is doing this. 

[Soul Crusher]

http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/02/obama-speech-jeremiah-wright-new-orleans


Obama - no more more money for highways t the suburbs.   

[Soul Crusher]

As the speech continues, Obama makes repeated and all-but-explicit appeals to racial solidarity, referring to “our” people and “our neighborhoods,” as distinct from the white majority. At one point, he suggests that black people were excluded from rebuilding contracts after the storm: “We should have had our young people trained to rebuild the homes down in the Gulf. We don’t need Halliburton doing it. We can have the people who were displaced doing that work. Our God is big enough to do that.”

This theme — that black Americans suffer while others profit — is a national problem, Obama continues: “We need additional federal public transportation dollars flowing to the highest need communities. We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs,” where, the implication is, the rich white people live. Instead, Obama says, federal money should flow to “our neighborhoods”: “We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods, so people don’t have to travel from miles away.”

[whork]

I moved to the suburbs, because I actually like sitting on my couch and not the floor, worrying about being picked off by a stray bullet living in the hood.

Or, as Chris Rock put it (in response to some black people that it's the media that makes some ignorant black folks look bad), "When I go the money machine tonight, I'm not looking over my back for the media; I'm looking for N&@^$Z!! Ted Koppel ain't never took s^#t from me; N&@^*Z HAVE!!!"

+1000

[Soul Crusher]

Obama’s Plan for Ohio : Making suburban taxpayers prop up failing Democratic cities
 National Review ^ | 10/08/2012 | Stanley Kurtz

Posted on Monday, October 08, 2012 9:54:05 AM

Suburbanites of Ohio, listen up. As swing voters in the ultimate swing state, you will have an outsized impact on this election. President Obama has pledged to govern in the interests of middle-class voters like you. With so much resting on your shoulders, that is a promise you should scrutinize with care. What exactly are Obama’s plans for Ohio’s suburban communities? The answer may shock you.

President Obama aims to help Ohio’s Democrats bail out your state’s struggling cities by forcibly transferring suburban tax money to urban treasuries. It’s a bold plan to redistribute the wealth of Ohio’s suburbs. It also calls for halting the sort of highway and commercial development that brings jobs and taxes to the suburbs. The shorthand for this is “regionalism.” Should Obama be reelected, a redistributive city-based regionalist agenda will likely be imposed on Ohio’s suburbs. The best way to envision the future of suburban Ohio in a second Obama term is to see how close this regionalist agenda came to enactment in Obama’s first four years.

Around 2006, Cleveland-area planners began floating proposals to grant the city access to taxes collected by surrounding suburbs. Their model was the Minneapolis–St. Paul region, where the Minnesota state legislature forces reluctant suburbanites to “share” their tax revenue with the cities. Cleveland’s regionalists also touted Portland, Ore., for its metropolitan planning agency. Portland’s planning commission has laid down an “urban growth boundary” that forbids highway or commercial development around the edges of the metropolitan area. Regionalists blame the plight of the cities on the loss of tax base to the suburbs. Blocking new highways that could ease commutes or serve as gateways to newly constructed suburbs is designed both to prevent further exodus and to press current suburbanites back toward the cities. This is what Obama was getting at in that recently released 2007 video where he said, “We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs.”

Redistributive tax sharing and urban-growth boundaries are rare and deeply controversial, in part because they are by design anti-suburban policies. They effectively permit big cities to gut the political and economic independence of their surrounding municipalities. The regionalist Left, President Obama included, wants to see these policies exported to every metropolitan area in America. And Cleveland was on board with the plan.

By 2007, the Cleveland Plain Dealer was touting Minnesota-style tax sharing, while suggesting that the humble “metropolitan planning organizations” (MPOs) that have long divvied out federal transportation funding might be converted into Portland-style regional planning commissions with the power to block suburban development. With these changes, Cleveland’s regionalists aimed either to prevent would-be suburbanites from moving out of the city or to capture a chunk of tax money from suburbanites who had already left.

In October 2007, Cleveland’s new regionalists sprang into action. The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA), the five-county MPO that channels federal transportation funding to the region, took an unprecedented step. Using powers conferred by NOACA’s weighted voting system, members from Cleveland and its poorer, inner-ring suburbs threatened to veto the construction of a highway interchange in Avon, a fast-growing, affluent suburb in neighboring Lorain County, unless Avon agreed to “share” taxes from businesses that moved near the new road.

Outraged board members from outlying counties felt strong-armed by Cleveland and the inner-ring suburbs of Cuyahoga County. Avon mayor Jim Smith said his supposedly voluntary agreement to “share” the town’s taxes with Cleveland felt more like the action of a hostage with a gun at his head. Cleveland’s regionalists, on the other hand, were delighted. They saw the Avon deal as a first big step for their ambitious new agenda to seize effective political and economic control of area suburbs.

The Democratic electoral sweep of 2008 quickly gave Cleveland’s regionalists the opening they were looking for. As Obama and the national Democrats embarked on their own transformative agenda, Democrats captured the Ohio House of Representatives for the first time in 14 years. The new House speaker, Armond Budish, a Democrat — the first speaker from Northeast Ohio in more than 70 years — pledged to enact a bold regionalist agenda across the state. With Democrat Ted Strickland in the governor’s mansion, prospects looked good for Portland-style planning agencies and a state-imposed tax-sharing program. Echoing Obama’s then–chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, Cleveland’s regionalists promised not to “waste” the financial crisis. They would seize on it instead to grant Cleveland access to the tax base of surrounding suburbs.

Mid-2009 saw the high tide of regionalism in Ohio. A group of mayors and city planners had established the Regional Prosperity Initiative (RPI) for 16 counties in Northeast Ohio. The RPI was floating proposals for regional tax-base sharing and consolidation of the four Northeast Ohio MPOs into a single regional planning agency. Consolidation would grant Cleveland and a few other urban areas the power to clamp down on development in suburbs across the region.

At this point, the anti-suburban agenda of Cleveland’s regionalists began to stir opposition. Alex Kelemen, a businessman and a soon-to-be member of Hudson’s city council, led the charge, often locked in debate with Hudson’s mayor, William Currin, a leader of the regionalist forces. Kelemen pointed out that under the RPI’s tax-sharing plan, a small municipality could be forced to divert local voter-approved education funding to a large city in a different county. Not only would that be undemocratic, it would make school levies nearly impossible to pass. Kelemen decried the RPI’s regionalist plans as the product of “a Cleveland-centered bureaucracy with contempt for growing suburbs and ignorance of business.”

In Democrat-dominated Columbus, objections by Kelemen and a growing number of suburban mayors across Northeast Ohio carried little weight. Yet by late 2010, the tide had turned. Overreach by Obama and congressional Democrats on health care and the stimulus package had stirred up the tea-party rebellion. Although Ohio’s Democrats held majorities capable of imposing regional tax-base sharing and urban-dominated planning councils, they held back, sensing the conservative tide in the upcoming midterm election.

A massive corruption scandal just then breaking in Cleveland-centric Cuyahoga County also stymied the regionalists’ plans. The idea of forcing suburban taxpayers to bail out a corrupt and mismanaged Cuyahoga County government in an election year was a nonstarter.

With President Obama’s help, however, that was far from the end of the line for Ohio’s regionalist agenda. Deeply committed to redistributive regionalism, in 2009 the Obama administration hailed Ohio’s RPI proposals as a national model. A year later, Northeast Ohio received a coveted “regional planning grant” under Obama’s little-known but potentially revolutionary Sustainable Communities Initiative. Despite a Republican resurgence in Ohio and victory for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, John Kasich, in 2010, the regionalists in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County would get a new shot at transforming the state.

The same crowd that ran NOACA and the RPI now took on leadership roles in the group created by Obama’s federal grant, the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium (NEOSCC). That gave Cleveland’s regionalists federal recognition, and potentially the ability to place federal-aid leverage behind their policy preferences.

NEOSCC has seen factional struggles between its bolder leftists and its more cautious political hands. The more progressive faction floats proposals like Portland-style urban-growth boundaries. Savvier regionalists understand that a piecemeal approach may quietly achieve the same end. If NEOSCC manages to merge the four metropolitan planning organizations in the 16-county region, it can then create a de facto growth boundary without formally declaring one. With weighted voting for cities, the new planning commission could block suburban development projects on a case-by-case basis.

Either tactic would deprive Ohio of jobs. For example, the state was thrilled in 2009 when a large new Barbasol shaving-cream plant located in the Cleveland exurb of Ashland, Ohio, rather than Syracuse, N.Y. Ashland extended rail, sewer, and road infrastructure out to semi-rural land to service the plant site. Urban-based “smart growth” planners would have forbidden all that as “sprawl,” and Barbasol’s new plant would now be in New York instead of Ohio.

NEOSCC is due to issue its final report in 2013, and that could spell trouble for suburban Ohio. Leaders of NEOSCC, as well as spokesmen for the RPI (often the same individuals), can be expected to press their agenda on the Ohio state legislature in 2013, particularly if Obama and the Democrats do well in 2012. A safely reelected Obama could put considerable regulatory muscle behind the group’s findings. Back in 2009, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan floated the idea of doling out federal aid in such a way as to advance the goals of Northeast Ohio’s regionalists. All Obama would have to do is condition Ohio’s receipt of various federal-aid programs on the state’s adherence to NEOSCC’s recommendations. It’s a tactic he’s used on other issues.

That only begins to describe Obama’s efforts on behalf of the regionalist agenda in Ohio. A group called Building One America (BOA) has attempted to draw politicians from inner-ring suburbs across Ohio into an alliance with city-based legislators on regionalist issues. BOA’s goal is to create in Columbus a political coalition capable of forcing tax-base sharing and large-scale regional planning on Ohio’s suburbs. BOA is run by some of the same community organizers who trained and worked with Barack Obama in his early Chicago days. Those left-leaning activists see regional tax-base sharing as the antidote to what they characterize as the greed of America’s suburbanites.

President Obama has lent BOA’s anti-suburban efforts the full prestige and resources of his administration. The White House hosted a BOA-organized conference attended by numerous Ohio politicians, for example, in July 2011. The assembled Ohio politicos heard speakers tout the advantages of Portland’s planning system as well as those of regional tax-base sharing in Minnesota. Obama’s ties to the regionalist movement run deep (as I show in my book on the topic, Spreading the Wealth). Reelect Obama and he’s sure to push for regionalism in Ohio and beyond.

In short, if President Obama is still around to help them, Ohio’s regionalists will get another bite at the apple in 2013. Tax sharing and large-scale regional planning were close to passage in 2009. With Obama backing up NEOSCC by putting strings on federal aid, and the White House supporting BOA’s coalition-building efforts in Columbus, prospects for a regionalist triumph in Ohio would be good. If Obama was in the White House and a Democrat took Ohio’s governorship in 2014, a regionalist revolution in the state would have to be reckoned more likely than not.

Be assured that if Ohio’s legislature sets up a regional tax-base-sharing scheme, it would transform the state. Legislation enabling and incentivizing the practice would surely be seized on by interests well beyond Northeast Ohio. The regionalist agenda may have come out of Cleveland, but every suburbanite in Ohio would feel the effects of its ratification by the state government.

Ohio’s regionalists will tell you that their tax-base-sharing plan is strictly voluntary. Don’t believe it. Their goal is to have Washington and Columbus create incentives and disincentives that leave suburbanites little choice but to sign on. Tax-base sharing in Ohio would be no more “voluntary” than was the agreement by Avon’s Mayor Smith to tax sharing in 2009.

So listen up, suburban Ohioans. When it comes to protecting your middle-class communities, President Obama talks a good game. Unfortunately, his well-laid anti-suburban plans tell a different story. The president and his fellow Democrats are coming for your tax money. Redistribution is the goal, and suburban Ohio is target No. 1. More broadly, Obama’s regionalist agenda is an attack on the values and way of life of suburban America. How odd it would be were Ohio’s suburban taxpayers to hand Obama the key to their own undoing. Forewarned is forearmed. Suburban Ohioans, it’s up to you.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This piece is adapted from his new book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.