O’Malley: $130 Million Poured into Baltimore a ‘Spit in a Bucket’

Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former Gov. Martin O’Malley  (D-MD), a potential candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, said the $130 million poured into Baltimore by government is “a spit in the bucket.”

When host Chuck Todd asked, “This morning The Washington Post has this headline, ‘Why couldn’t 130 million transform Baltimore’s poorest places?’ One-hundred-thirty million dollars was poured into this community over the last twenty years. Are we not spending the money correctly? What are we getting wrong here? Money has been there. What do we get wrong?”

O’Malley said, “We have not had an agenda for American cities  probably since Jimmy Carter and that era. We left cities to fend for themselves. Because of the dedication of a lot of mayors and good people throughout cities in America, cities have been actually coming back. we actually see more younger people moving back to the city than we have in decades and it’s one of the higher numbers of any city in America. The structural problems that we have in our economy, the way we ship jobs and profits abroad, the way we failed to invest in our infrastructure and American cities, We are creating the conditions. Please Speaker Boehner and his crocodile tears about the $130 million, that is a spit in the bucket compared to what we need to do as a nation to rebuild our country. America cities are the heart of our country we need an agenda for American cities. We need to stop ignoring especially people of color and act like they are disposable citizens. That’s not our economy works or our country works.”

Saying he was proud of  his record as mayor of Baltimore O’Malley continued, “This should be a wake-up call what happened in Baltimore should be a wake-up call for the country. The protests that also happened New York, Philadelphia and other cities. We have deep problems as a country. We need deeper understanding if we are going to give our children a better future.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN