It should have been. Really. It should have been freakin’ utopia.

The Left always says that the reason America isn’t Utopia is that they’re not sufficiently in charge.

Well, in New Orleans, like NO other American city, the Left was in charge. Dimmocratic mayor. Dimmocratic political machine ran freakin’ EVERYTHING. Police department. School board. EVERYTHING.

There were enough votes in New Orleans to where only the strongest of political campaigns could write off New Orleans. That’s why we ended up with such luminaries as our governess, Miz Blanco, and our dimmocratic senator, Miz Landrieu. Their Republican opponents just couldn’t overcome the dimmocratic bloc of New Orleans. A Republican mayor? You’ll see Osama bin Ladin selected as Pope first…

Because of this, New Orleans always managed to get a disproportionate share of state tax dollars. New Orleans also got a disproportionate amount of Federal tax dollars.

New Orleans taxes the living daylights out of anyone who can pay at the local level, 9% sales tax. Property tax is 171+ mills. Think Boston is “Taxachusetts”? New Orleans property taxes are higher than Boston. Of course, Louisiana’s homestead exemption keeps lower and middle class homeowners from paying. Businesses get the crap taxed out of them. Lots of businesses moved out of New Orleans.

New Orleans taxes the crap out of the tourists. Hotel rooms are taxed at 13% plus a fee of from one to three dollars depending on the size of the hotel.

A lot of tax dollars flow into New Orleans, tax dollars that aren’t raised from New Orleans citizens.

But New Orleans had what the lefty libs say is necessary to become Utopia: Dimmocrats in charge. Solidly in charge. From top to bottom.

So what did they get instead of utopia?

Graft of Biblical proportion. Corruption that rocketed them to the heights of corruption statistics in a state that wrote the book on political corruption. A labyrinth of regulatory agencies, each which must be satisfied with fees and inspections before any real work can be done on any project.

A school system that soaks up money like a sponge while buildings fall down and students score at the bottom of everybody’s scale on standardized tests. Double-digit dropout rates. Teacher qualifications are a joke. But then you don’t need much education to exist in the next thing New Orleans has.

A welfare class. In the city that likes to talk about itself being the example of diversity, they have a poor, very poor black underclass. Generation after generation come and go, living the same hopeless, goalless existence, fed by tax dollars, run through that rubber-stamp education system, and turned back loose on the streets equipped only to perform menial tasks in the tourism industry or to sit at home waiting for another government check. And vote. Dimmocratic. A New Orleans voting precinct might be 98 or 98% for a dimmocrat running against a Republican. Orleans Parish was 77% for Kerry in the last presidential campaign.

New Orleans should be perfect. Instead, a liberal columnist for the New York Times says this:

New Orleans has had high rates of illiteracy and high rates of poverty, and long before the hurricane blew in, high rates of children and families with extraordinarily low expectations. In short, much of the city was a mess, and no one was marshaling the considerable resources necessary to help pull its stricken residents out of the trouble of their daily lives.

But the dimmocrats ARE IN CHARGE in New Orleans. If there’s ANY city in the country where the number of poor black families should be declining, it should be New Orleans. African-Americans are not a minority in New Orleans. The city is 68% African-American.

Dimmocrats are in charge in New Orleans. They control the purse-strings. We;ve already talked about the tax dollars available to the city, so you’d think that with the “right people” in charge, the future would be bright for the poor underclass.

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, dimmocratic plans for running a big city just might be wrong. Becaus eif they were right, New Orleans would be Utopia…