Upon reading the amazing book "Amazing MN" by Lee Lynch, we found ourselves smug and proud of our adoptive state, Minnesota. Fact after fact, picture after picture, evoked "Wow, we're lucky to live here."
Minnesota has invested wisely in literacy and education, recreational sites, arts, sports teams and venues, quality of life institutions, businesses, health, and good-government traditions.
But then (there's always a "but"), in Joe's native Chicago, a ride on the "L" tells a different story. It's the tale of boarded-up neighborhoods, crime-infested streets, lack of viable businesses. One wonders if some of the money invested in the Lake Michigan waterfront area (museums, sports stadiums, parks) had been invested in these inner-city neighborhoods, would we have less suffering and maybe even a more beautiful downtown? Hard to know for sure, but we have always believed that a wise investment in the less fortunate, in the form of skills training and education, would make all of us wealthier — with a better quality of life.
We began looking in "Amazing MN" for statistics and pictures about the less fortunate in Minnesota — statistics showing that we had a smaller "achievement gap." Unfortunately, we found the opposite. According to the Pew Research Center, the wealth gap between white and black Minnesotans stands at its highest level since 1989. Minnesota ranks dead last with the highest median household income gap in the nation. Most recent numbers rank Minnesota 48th for blacks, 46th for Asians and 45th for Hispanics. Forty-five percent of Native Americans in the Twin Cities live in poverty. A Metropolitan Council study showed that if the Twin Cities were to eliminate disparities, there would be 124,000 more people with jobs and 274,000 fewer people in poverty.
Aristotle said, "To spend money is easy, but to spend it wisely is very difficult." Thus, we are not advocating that we should have cut the budget 10 percent for the $1.2 billion Minnesota Vikings stadium or the multimillion-dollar monster homes on Lake Minnetonka and should have given that to the poor. In fact, that could actually hurt the poor if it promotes dependency. The "have-nots" need to earn their way to financial independence. It is our job to offer the hand up.
Here are a few ways we should debate how we could spend our money more wisely:
• Require that 30 percent of the work on government-subsidized developments in the Twin Cities, such as the Vikings stadium, go to minority contractors or workers. One of us (Don) had a hand in demanding that level of participation, as a condition of city support.
• Require that low-income families occupy 20 percent of the housing in subsidized developments. This, too, often happens, but let us increase the practice.
