Ted,
There were major cutbacks of those programs under the Reagan/Bush era.....a lot of disabled and mentally incompetent people were put out onto the streets.
No offense, but I am curious where you get these "facts"? Are you making them up as you go?
Actually, the emptying of the mental institutions happened in the 70s, and the people who pushed for de-institutionalization were liberals.
Unfortunatelly, the liberals did not think this through (gee, what a surprise), and what was supposed to replace the mental institutions - community based centers were either not ready or so badly mismanaged that we ended up with the "homeless problem".
I find it curious that for every debacle of the liberalism, a myth is created to assign the blame to Reagan.
The fact is that there were over half a million people in mental institutions in the 60s. Now they are down to about 100,000, while the population grew. The liberals made it impossible to lock up a mental patient against his/her will, no matter how dangerous he is to himself or to others.
So what the liberals did out of their compassion was to release people from mental institution. They were released to the streets, where these people suffered greatly, were abused, and they themselves commited crimes which caused them to end up where they belong - and institution, (but in this case a less appropriate institution - jail), but along the way, the liberals left a trail of murder victims, rape victims, suicide victims etc.
Do you sense a pattern of what I said about liberals in another post? I am sure the liberals felt good about themselves that they "freed" these individuals from the bad institutions. Nothing but a continuous string of tragedies resulted from this action. But that's irrelevant. We always have Reagan to blame.
Joe |
