Question

Congratulations! You have just been elected to the United States House of Representatives to represent your district in our nation's capitol. As your first order of business, you have been selected to address your colleagues in the house on the subject of Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and other taxpayer funded community development initiatives. You have 2 minutes to argue for one of the following points:

• continuing the CDBG program and increasing the amount of money in the federal budget allocated to them
• continuing the CDBG program at the current funding level
• continuing the CDBG program, but drastically decrease funding
• doing away with the CDBG program

Answer 1

The Community Development Block Grants or CDBG as it is known as one of the programs run by the US government. It has been started 45 years ago and its fund is distributed to state and local governments according to population size as well as poverty levels to assist in developing housing needs.

Such programs rarely serve the purpose and historically such programs tend to have mismanagement or defective allocation of funds. That is why it is not surprising that the Obama administration reduced its funding while the Trump administration is trying to get rid of it. An audit by Housing and Urban Development and by other private agencies showed that there is little difference made by these grants and most of the times it has been used for repairing city halls.

The US system favors capitalism and free market theory. It means there should be more opportunities, more economic choices, lesser restrictions while more individual freedom as well as responsibility. The federal or state level grants for community improvement is necessary but that should be a time-bound option and it can not be continued forever. Local bodies should manage these programs through collections of taxes, issuing bonds or through public-private partnerships.

Government aid means giving a way to socialism and bureaucracy to take a foothold which enables favoritism, lobbying, and corruption. Such programs can not be run forever and should have time-bound validity.