This is nice, but also kind of infuriating:
ORLANDO, Fla. — Two decades ago, Harris Rosen, who grew up poor on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and became wealthy in the Florida hotel business, decided to shepherd part of his fortune into a troubled community with the melodious sounding name of Tangelo Park.
...[T]his neighborhood of small, once-charming houses seemed a world away from theme park pleasures as its leaders tried to beat back drugs, crime and too many shuttered homes. Nearly half its students had dropped out of school.
Twenty-one years later, with an infusion of $11 million of Mr. Rosen’s money so far, Tangelo Park is a striking success story. Nearly all its seniors graduate from high school, and most go on to college on full scholarships Mr. Rosen has financed.
Young children head for kindergarten primed for learning, or already reading, because of the free day care centers and a prekindergarten program Mr. Rosen provides. Property values have climbed. Houses and lawns, with few exceptions, are welcoming. Crime has plummeted....
Mr. Rosen believes the difference he's made is that he's given the community an important element it had been missing:
“Hope,” Mr. Rosen said.
Why devote countless hours to school if college, with its high cost, is out of reach?
“If you don’t have any hope,” he added, “then what’s the point?”...
The comprehensive nature of the community supports he's provided is what has made it such a success:
“This program is drastically different from others because it wraps both arms around the community and says we are here to serve you and help you become the best person that you can be,” said Bernice King, the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the director of the King Center in Atlanta, which gave Mr. Rosen an award in January. “A lot of these programs, they have only one piece here and one piece there.”
Mr. Rosen, who heads Rosen Hotels and Resorts, provides college scholarships each year to all Tangelo Park seniors headed for Florida public colleges and trade schools. The scholarships pay tuition, room and board, books and travel costs.
For the youngest children, he created a system of free day care centers in Tangelo Park homes, ensuring that the certified providers, who are also the homeowners, instruct children as young as 2. He also started and finances a prekindergarten program in the local elementary school and offers parents training through the University of Central Florida on how to support their children.
Rosen thinks there are many other wealthy people who should do something similar to what he's done.
I agree. But why should it be just random rich people picking out a community at random to help, out of the the goodness of their hearts?
Comprehensive support to communities, making sure people have the education they need to succeed in life, from early childhood right through to college, university, or training or retraining in a trade, is something that government used to think was part of its mandate to promote the general welfare of the people.
Only government has the capacity to do this for ALL communities, not just the ones lucky enough to be chosen for help by a good-hearted billionaire.
Mr. Rosen is right -- there are many other wealthy people who should do something similar to what he's done.
The best way to accomplish what he has is by paying taxes and and no longer trying to destroy the functions of government. Stop trying to destroy the public school system by siphoning off school funding into private charter schools. Stop squeezing public funding for higher education and trying to drive that public money to for-profit colleges that benefit their shareholders and leave students holding crushing debt.
As Bernie Sanders says:
If you’ve seen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the top one ten of one percent, in our view, you ought to transfer that back. When radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, I think the highest marginal tax rate was ninety percent or something like that.”
That would help a lot of hope to be brought to a lot more communities than just little Tangelo Park, Florida, population 3000.
Of course, at a 90 percent marginal tax rate there wouldn't be so many good-hearted billionaires around to warm us with the spread of their personal generosity, but I think most of us could manage to live with that.