"You're eating the young"

In the South, we used to call it eating the seed corn.  Farming requires saving some seeds for the crop next year.  In times of famine, desperate families would eat the corn saved for the following year because death by starvation would prevent planting future crops.


[This week in Huffington, John Rudolf profiles one community for which that vicious cycle is more vicious than most. "Newark's cops do not work at an ordinary job, like the rest of us," he writes. The dangers they routinely face, coupled with years of catastrophic budget cuts, make the men and women of the Newark PD more like "soldiers on the front lines of a ceaseless, low-intensity war."

With compelling interviews with Newark's finest and a steady barrage of devastating statistics, John paints a picture of a community in crisis. Newark has about as many cops on the streets today as it did in the 1970s. Well over a third of children live in poverty, and the city's heavily minority population suffers disproportionately from the effects of the jobs crisis.

A wave of police layoffs in 2010 coincided with sweeping state cuts in education. To look closely at the situation in Newark is to come face to face with a tragic truth: as a result of the ongoing financial crisis, we are not investing nearly enough in our children's safety or in their future opportunities. As Brendan O'Flaherty, a Columbia economics professor says, "Why would you decide that the first thing you want to cut is police and education? You're eating the young."] emphasis added
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/cutbacks-and-cops_b_1726063.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=080312&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief