An odd and hugely unpopular solution to fix things...

Hello, I am a bleeding heart, wealthy, out-of-touch liberal and I would like to talk about cleaning up the streets. For the record, I do not like crime, I have no problem sending bad guys to prison and having cops protect the city. Ideally, I would send all addicts to rehab, all crazy people to mental health facilities and all bad guys to prison. The obvious problem is that it is extremely expensive and dealing with it is always politically unpopular with some people depending on how you go about it. We are a small state and so we don't generate enough in state taxes to afford all the things we need to fix our problems. At the end of we simply need more facilities of all kinds and a way to pay for it.

The only way I can think of paying for this is to get a ton of Federal money and one way we can do that and tie everything together...is to also build a federal prison to house federal prisoners from out of state. I know that is going to be insanely unpopular, but the thing is the government needs places to put federal prisoners and will help you build everything and help pay for your other programs with federal tax dollars which we need. We are also near a popular border which is good for federal prisons and can probably help us negotiate things.

The idea would be to negotiate a deal with the federal government to build a large federal prison facility near the border to house people they already have in custody, and in return they help us fund drug rehab, mental health, and state prison programs. Aspects of the deal would also stipulate we use as much local business as possible in the construction and that the jobs created to run these facilities would be from Vermonters, not people brought in from outside.

For every federal prison bed you build, you help us build one bed in a state prison and one bed in a mental health/addiction facility. Something like that. It generates money so we can actually pay for this, it creates more room in prisons which we need for actual bad guys (violent people, rapists etc.). And it also creates more beds which we need for people struggling with mental health and addiction.

Building these things here is scary and unpopular, but at the end of the day it also keeps as much money as possible "in house". The jobs created will be here, so the tax dollars that fund it will be going to people that live here and will end up back in our communities.

If anyone made it this far, I would be curious to know your thoughts and any other ideas you have on how to get tons of federal funding for the stuff we need to build.