Pete Buttigieg Rating
Pete Buttigieg - Rating
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Pete Buttigieg Platform)(Pete Buttigieg Rating Update: Two days before Super Tuesday on March 3, 2020 when 25% of the Democratic primary votes are cast, Pete Buttigieg ended his campaign to boost Joe Biden's attempt to beat Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, likely in exchange to be Biden's vice presidential pick if the attempt succeeds. This cunning move raises Buttigieg's chance of becoming president, as Joe Biden's declining mental acuity is unlikely to last until 2024. Our rating of Pete Buttigieg remains as below.)
Pete Buttigieg was born in, raised and became the mayor of South Bend, an Indiana town, a large minority of whose residents live in poverty. But his isn't a feel good story of a boy born into poverty who leads his town out of it.
Pete Buttigieg was born into elite academia. Both of his parents were PhD professors at the University of Notre Dame, located adjacent to South Bend. Pete Buttigieg studied at Harvard and Oxford, then worked at McKinsey, the global management consulting firm beloved by corporate raiders and feared by the employees they lay off, from 2007 to 2010.
In 2011, Buttigieg won 10,991 votes to become the mayor of South Bend, and promptly put his McKinsey training to work. To attract the rich and push out the poor, he announced a "1,000 Houses in 1,000 Days" directive that gave the owners of South Bend's most dilapidated and vacant 1,000 houses 1,000 days to fix them up or face his demolition crew.
Most of the threatened homeowners lacked the money, time and/or health to fix up their houses in time, and in the end, 60% of the houses were razed by Mayor Pete's demolition crews. Buttigieg now tries to dress up destroying six hundred houses as an economic success, but the facts reveal it to have been an economic and environmental disaster.
Instead of being re-developed, the six hundred empty lots that Buttigieg's directive created in South Bend's poorest neighborhoods have remained empty or become dumping sites, and even brought groundhogs, raccoons and other wild animals into those neighborhoods, whose crime rate also rose after the demolitions.
Moreover, the demolitions, rushed without containment or careful planning in order to meet Buttigieg's artificial deadline, showered those neighborhoods with asbestos released from six hundred houses, as well as lead. According to municipal records, almost 80% of the houses in South Bend were built before lead paint usage on houses was banned in 1978. A team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame recently found that in some of the neighborhoods affected by Buttigieg's house demolitions, over 25% of the children still have elevated levels of lead in their blood.
As for bringing money into South Bend, Mayor Pete turned to gambling, in the form of the Four Winds Casino that opened in 2018 on the outskirts of South Bend, whose government gets 1% of the money that people lose at the casino, which keeps the rest.
Pete Buttigieg's immaturity also gained attention when he hastily jumped into and ignited simmering racial tension in South Bend's 160-person police department into a full blown internal war that led to lawsuits and settlement payouts of almost a million dollars.
What was the result of Pete Buttigieg's tenure as the mayor of South Bend?
Asbestos and lead poisoning for the poor, higher crime rate in and wild animals roaming their neighborhoods, increased gambling addiction, and a bitterly divided police force. According to United Way's ALICE Project, the number of South Bend residents living in poverty rose from 2010 to 2016. And according to Princeton University's The Eviction Lab, South Bend's tenant eviction rate also rose and became the 18th highest in America.
Even without the disturbing issues surrounding his religion and anti-Christian beliefs, the issues above are more than enough to expose Pete Buttigieg as an immature neophyte who couldn't manage a town. Even if he had built six hundred houses, that still wouldn't qualify him to become the president of the United States. But Pete Buttigieg's claim to fame is having destroyed six hundred houses and poisoning people.
Our rating of his candidacy for the presidency is an F.