Ned Baily
A recent report details how government determines the winners and losers of cities withen states and nothing illustrates this more than Wisconsin's twin cities of Madison and Milwaukee. In the past thirty years government has rewarded the state capital and essentially itself in Wisconsin and Madison has grown like forty percent with an average household income of seventy thousand dollars while Milwaukee has dramatically declined in both population and income wages. the average household of Milwaukee is some forty grand and in this battle between private industry and government in Wisconsin it is clear that government won bigtime. Madison like Austin, Texas and other select cities thrived the impact of higher education and new technology; entrepreneurship and new businesses and stimulus programs through the great society to Obama's stimulus. older commercial centers were allowed to whither and conspired with investing class to create these no=go zones of investing for long periods of time to depreciate value and have reservations for low-income people to gravitate to when they get displaced in gentrifying areas. these inequalities also extend towards higher education arena withen the stae University sysytems as total spending per student, UW-Madison spends $59,000, compared with $19,000 at UW-Milwaukee. This difference is largely in research dollars which elites are inposition to determine where they shall be directed and in Wisconsen much of it went towards Madison as it draws more interest for foreigners to relocate than say Lacrosse. The Madison research spending per student is $26,000, compared to $2,600 in Milwaukee and you see very few students from China and india wish to locate in the jungles of Milwaukee. The other rural state sysytems also see huge drop-offs of expenditure directed their ways and the situation will get worse following Scott Walker's decisions to cut spending for higher education. The disparities between Madison and Milwaukee is the result of this new public-private partnership where they get to decide where public dollars gets diverted and invested.
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