I'd rather live in the suburbs of the United States than anywhere else on earth.
Hmmm. Cities = Democrat leanings... Suburbs = Republican leaning...
Hey let's come up with a reason to make more cities!!!
Correction..........Crushing debt makes you sick. If you buy a house and finance $150,000 of it, demand two new cars and finance them, then live in fear of the items you had to have, well that's no surprise.
After having seen the word "obesity" earlier in the article, the source of funding came as absolutely NO surprise to me.
Commuting leaves you too tired to exercise - or do much of anything else on wweknights.
I grew up in the country (literally a swamp)...
I have lived in a city and felt I would die from the trapped feeling.
I lived in the suburbs and felt less trapped, but I still felt crowded and was freaked at the total loss of privacy.
I moved back to the swamp, drive into the city to work, then return home to be has happy as I was when I was a kid.
Living in big cities can lead to gunshot wounds.
It's Bush's fault. No one had any problems before he was elected. Except during Reagan's term. And Nixon's.
/sarcasm. I'd love to get a job as a researcher and get fat government grants to study stuff that people either already know, or don't care about.
But in the United States, the cities are infested with liberals. In fact, they are dominated by liberals. It kind of ruins it.
There is some merit to this, although I doubt the motivation for the piece is the same as my take on it.
I used to live in a Maryland suburb of DC, 2 months ago I moved to rural Tennessee. My commute time is the same now as it was before, appx. 1 hr. But for some reason I have lost 10 pounds in two months and generally feel much better than I did when I lived in suburbia.
I think it's because I don't see nearly as many Kerry stickers as before, but my wife says it's because the yardwork that I could once tackle in a 1/2 hour now takes 3 days. Either way I'm much happier.
Robert Wood Johnson foundation one of the richest leftie foundatons going - is for bigger govt. and will find any excuse to expand big government.
From a website:
"The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for example, has embarked on a $16.8 million plan, called Communities in Charge, "to expand health care access," and a $47 million program, called Covering Kids, "to promote child health insurance programs." The latter, notes the Capital Research Center publication, "will fund partnerships between nonprofits and government agencies in all 50 states to promote Medicaid coverage and other insurance programs for children."
Let's see, what are they really after? "Free" health care for suburbanites, paid for by themselves through taxes, or maybe more money for inner-city "programs", or pour more into schools, or maybe they just want more money for themselves to study it some more - BINGO!
How to shut up a liberal:
Next time one of these libs cites this study as to why suburbs are bad and should be legislated out of existance with new 'smart growth' laws, ask them if they really want restrict lifestyle choices with laws. They'll come back with the argument that the health care costs from these 'bad lifestyle choices' are a burden on society. Then hang them with their own words by forcing them into a liberal Sophie's Choice, by noting that homosexual males have a life expectancy nearly 2 decades shorter than straight males, AIDS treatment is extremely expensive, so are they saying that for societal good legislation should also be introduced to restrict the gay lifestyle?
Conditions such as hypertension, joint pain and headavches are too often self-diagnosed and largely untreated and reflect more the current attitude of the respondent than any underlying illness or disease.
For perspective, there only two places for an expanding population to go: out or up.
The reason commuters spend so much time in cars is that the government does such a lousy job of building roads. Where I live in the suburbs, there is only one freeway into the city and when there is one accident somewhere along the way the traffic is held up everywhere.
People around here have the odd view that roads create traffic. I was watching a debate between local candidates a few years back and they were asked if they were in favor of a new road that would have served as a handy local alternate to the only freeway we have. They were unanimously opposed to it because they feared that people would actually drive on it and traffic would occur. The anti-growth environmental wackos have made "traffic" such a dirty word that we have come to the point that so little road construction occurs that all roads are clogged with cars going so slowly and inefficiently that they are contributing much more pollution than they would be on an efficient road system.