The Big Lies About America’s Problems

It’s all a lie. 

Contrary to what you’ve been told, American cities are not suffering from homelessness, crime, bad schools, housing unaffordability, drug overdoses, gangbangers, broken families, and wide swaths of seediness, shabbiness, poor upkeep, and crumbling infrastructure.

In truth, there’s none of that in my adopted hometown of Tucson, or in my boyhood hometown of St. Louis, or in the barrio where I lived in San Antonio, or in other places I’ve lived and worked, including Chicago and metro New York.

Here in Tucson, local media have spread the fake news that 78 miles of copper wire have been stolen from street lights over the last year.  The Census Bureau has lied about Tucson’s poverty rate being nearly 20 percent.  And CrimeGrade.org has fibbed in giving Tucson a crime grade of D+.

There is no way that crime can be that bad or that Tucsonans can be that poor and desperate, not with hundreds of millions of dollars being spent in redeveloping downtown Tucson into a Potemkin Village of low-wage bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and venues—as just about every US city has done—through a financing scheme that shifts money from neighborhoods to downtown.

Reports that the nation’s air traffic control system is dangerously antiquated are also a lie.  The same for reports that the US has lost 95 percent of its shipbuilding capacity and skills, thus calling into question its ability to win a conflict with China in the South China Sea.  Likewise, it’s fake news that the national debt is $36 trillion and that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlements and transfer payments are on an unsustainable path.

Some dishonest economists are even spreading the malicious untruth that major causes of America’s trade deficits are the nation’s low savings rate and high indebtedness, as well as the preference of Americans to spend borrowed money on consumption and immediate gratification instead of saving, investing and producing for the longer-term.

How do we know that all of the aforementioned are lies?

Because of a recent Wall Street Journal article:  “Cities Turn to Sports Stadiums to Snap Out of Downtown Doom Loop,” by Rebecca Picciotto, May 9, 2025.

The article said that cities are planning to spend billions on the building of sports stadia and connected mixed-use development as a way of bringing prosperity to a metropolis.  This is a new twist of an old and largely discredited idea—namely, turning downtowns into playgrounds for the hoity-toity who can afford it and for the hoi polloi who can’t.

Speaking of the hoi polloi, a video in the on-line article of the story said that a family of four would spend $145 in 1991 to watch an NFL game in a stadium.  The cost is now $600.

To quote from the article:

The Washington Commanders are planning a $3.8 billion stadium project with housing, hotels and retail. It would include public and private funding.

In Nashville, Tenn., the Titans are building a $2.2 billion football stadium as a centerpiece for new housing, hotels and office space.

The A’s baseball team is relocating to a new $1.7 billion stadium in Vegas, which plans to anchor a surrounding casino-resort with more than 3,000 hotel rooms.

These price tags will be even higher as mixed-use developments sprout up around the arenas.

Over the next 15 years, there could be more than $100 billion of investment opportunity for sports-anchored mixed-use districts, Klutch Sports Group estimated.

Such developments are proof that lies are being told about America’s problems.  If the aforementioned problems facing cities and the nation were real and not lies, then certainly money would be spent on solving them instead of on bread and circuses.  After all, Americans love their nation more than that, are not as selfish as that, are not as shallow as that, are not as gullible as that, and are not as shortsighted as that.

I wouldn’t lie about that.

Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.