A recent vacation took me to the City of Seattle for several days.  No, I didn’t travel to Seattle to celebrate it’s $15 an hour minimum wage. Seattle was the embarkation point for a cruise to Alaska.  Now, living in New Jersey, I thought I was accustomed to high prices, but Seattle was something else.  Prices for hotels in the downtown area were uniformly high.  By that I mean that the prices of every recognizable brand name hotel from Holiday Inn to Hyatt and Westin ranged from $275 to $350 a night.  But wait, add to that taxes exceeding 15%.  Seattle is a boom town, you see.  It is the site of numerous major corporations which employ thousands of workers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, Costco, and Nordstrom; not to mention Starbucks.  Construction projects seem to dot every block of the city.  It’s one of the fastest growing cities in America, and its unemployment rate has dipped below 4%.  The Seattle metro area boasts 8 billionaires and 68,000 millionaires.  The whole place reeks of affluence.  That’s why I was so surprised to find in Seattle one of the most egregious homeless problems I’ve ever experienced.  I’ve been to big cities, and I’ve lived near New York City my entire life, so I’m no stranger to encounters with homeless people.  Hell, there was a time when, whenever you drove out of the Holland Tunnel, you’d be greeted by a street guy who’d spit on your windshield, scrape it with a filthy squeegy and then demand money.  Rudy Giuliani put an end to that.  What was shocking in Seattle was the extent of the homeless problem.  In San Francisco, the panhandlers concentrate on the streets where the cable cars run.  I’m certainly no fan of the nutty liberal policies in San Francisco, but they provide shelters; at least they’re trying.  In Seattle, the panhandlers are everywhere. That’s bad enough, but the city’s “solution” to the problem seems to be not just to tolerate homeless “holding camps” in every city park, and under Interstate Highway overpasses, but to actively encourage the spread of these Obamavilles.  Another “solution” they employ is to lock all the bathrooms in public buildings downtown.  They’re very progressive, you see.  I had never been to Seattle.  I relied on a city website for sightseeing locations.  One was Pioneer Square “the city’s first downtown”, with “gorgeous neoclassical buildings and some of the hottest restaurants around town.”  It didn’t mention that this area was the site of the first “Skid Row” in the 19th century.  It’s still Skid Row.  We never felt safe.  At the famous Pike’s Place Market there were thousands of tourists, and down every alleyway sketchy people waited.  We abandoned our attempt to walk to the waterfront when confronted by the prospect of a bum with a knife in his pocket just kind of circling, waiting for us.  For three days, I never saw a Seattle policeman.  This is not a criticism of the police.  You have to understand that Seattle is one of the cities where the U.S. Justice Department is trying to take over the police department, and being so progressive and all, well – you wouldn’t want a police presence to cause violence, like in Baltimore.  Not for nothing, but in Times Square, there’s a cop on every corner and people safely come and go all hours of the day and night.  So, if Seattle has full employment, big companies, a growing economy and high tax revenue, why did its Mayor just declare a state of emergency on homelessness?  Despite the Obama “recovery,” and all his bull crap about low unemployment, homelessness in Seattle is up 37% this past year.  I finally found out where all those people who dropped out of the labor force went.  They’re begging for money in Seattle.  The media isn’t concerned enough to report this.  Obama is from Chicago, where homelessness is rapidly increasing.  Have you heard that on the news?  He lives in Washington, D.C., and homelessness is up 13% there too.  MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox – nobody’s mentioned it; they’re not concerned.  We were told Ronald Reagan was responsible for unconscionable homelessness in the 1980’s.  In 2015, Susan Sarandon was still blaming Reagan  for today’s homelessness.  Since Reagan, the number of homeless has doubled, but the media is as unconcerned about that as it is about any of Hillary Clinton’s crimes.  Undoubtedly Washington State will vote for Hillary in November, homelessness will get worse, and it will still be Reagan’s fault.   It can’t ever be the fault of a Democrat because they are progressive, they care about the homeless, unlike those cold-hearted Republicans.  I’m sure it’s a great comfort to the people sleeping on the streets of Seattle to know the Democrats are the ones who care.  On a bus, taking us from downtown Seattle out to the airport, the driver, while explaining that all those tents under the freeway were homeless camps, said it best.  “The politicians here claim that they are progressive, but they’re really only permissive.  They enable these people and do nothing to help them get them off of alcohol and drugs and get a job.”  Well said bus driver Dave.  It’s too bad the bus drivers don’t run the country.