Rep. Allan West is the freshman Republican liberals love to hate, because, well, he takes a lot of really odious public positions. But he's also kind of an easy target, because he says things like this:
I think that we need to extend those tax cuts permanently across the board. Look, I come from a — an area down in South Florida where unemployment is at 13 percent, foreclosures are absolutely high. We are seeing closed upon closed storefronts. But yet, when you walk around here in Washington, D.C., you don’t see people getting laid off, you don’t see, you know, anyone suffering, you don’t see the foreclosures.
Maybe in the part of D.C. that West is used to frequenting. According to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, unemployment in Ward 8 was 26.5 percent in 2009. The foreclosure rate in Ward 7 is 21.4 percent.
The unemployed in D.C., nearly 71% of whom are black, are disproportionately more likely to have worked low-wage jobs prior to being unemployed, and about a third of them have been looking for work for more than six months. I'm sure if West asks Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Berry nicely, he'd be happy to give him a tour of some of the areas outside Capitol Hill.
