Cigarette smokers paid some $4.5 million in tax revenue in the first four months of the newly voted Cuyahoga County arts tax.  They also paid another $904,376 in smoking taxes to help pay for the Browns Football Stadium in the same period.

I bring this up because recently another reporter asked me, What I would do to solve the city’s problems?  I didn’t give him any good answers.  I don’t have them.  I’m not a policy maker.

What to do about city problems, however, can be solved.  The will to solve, however, isn’t there.

The $5.5 million tax collection cited above shows that we could raise money for some tasks when we really want to do so.

Not, however, for the truly severe problems of the city.  The will to do it for urban problems is not there.  The pols are not interested enough to try to change public opinion.

I think about this in relation to the problems identified in the news media these days about “young thugs,” essentially black youth in this town.  So much gnashing of teeth; so little real attention to the problems we have known for so long.

Forty years ago next month, I traveled to Cincinnati to meet another Wall Street Journal reporter to examine that city after its summer riot.

I remember it well because what turned out to be the story of the riot was more an examination of business leadership and how it turned its back on young blacks with no jobs.  A fundamental problem then, a basic problem now.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen here, but it did. How come?” asked the story of riots in Cincinnati that summer long ago.

The story revealed that a Committee of 28, half “Negro leadership” and half top corporate leaders including the bosses of Procter & Gamble, Kroger’s, Cincinnati Milling Machine and the Lazarus department store chain, had been meeting secretly to address the problems.

“… They mistakenly thought talk could substitute for action – and particularly action to find jobs for the needy,” the story said.

The demands were for a few thousand jobs for young people.

All that was produced, however, was talk.  The result was “very few jobs” from major Cincinnati companies.  As one of the business leaders admitted, “We didn’t’ come up with anything near what they wanted.”

I was reminded of this by two reports last week.

On Saturday, Bob Herbert of the New York Times did a piece from Camden, N. J.  Herbert talked about the bleak outlook for jobs for young blacks.  He quotes one youngster...

“‘I been looking for a job, but you know….’ He shrugged.  “I went to the McDonald’s. I was up to the Cherry Hill Mall.  Ain’t too much out here.”

Then Herbert quotes a study by a Boston university that says from January through May...

“The national teen employment rate averaged only 33.1 percent, tying for the lowest employment rate in the past 60 years.”

What are the kids doing?  Herbert quotes one saying that they push weed, cut hair, lift stuff and girls do “their thing.”

“It’s no picnic out here.  It’s depressing,” says the young man.

Now the other study is an examination of poverty statistics in Ohio.  It’s called: “The State of Poverty in Ohio 2007 – Jobs Vanish & Incomes Plunge as Inequality Rises; Poverty Reaches All-Time High Since the War on Poverty.”  It was done by the Center for Community Solutions in collaboration with the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies.

Very depressing stuff.

It shows a map revealing the incidence of poverty.  Each dot represents 100 persons who live in poverty.

Cleveland is just one big black blotch on the map.  It’s all poverty.

Cuyahoga County in 2005 has 15 to 34% of its people living below poverty, according to the report.

Ohio is a disgrace.

The report notes that Ohio fell into recession at the end of 2000 and continued to bleed jobs until the third quarter of 2004.  Recovery in many regions of Ohio, however, “was marginal at best.”

Another weekly economic report by the Center’s George Zeller shows that Ohio has trailed the U. S. in job growth for a record 135 months (not weeks), breaking its own previous record of 134 months.

From the second quarter of 2000 to the second quarter of 2006, Cuyahoga County had a net job loss of 8.94%.

Ohio lost 189,976 jobs in the same period.

The Ohio job losses translate into more than $4 billion dollars of lost income around the state.

Moreover, this is in a period when those in the higher income categories are enjoying increases, meaning the middle and lower ends are doing even worse than the aggregate figures.

I don’t want to belabor the statistics.  They are all bad but you can read them yourself.

I suspect, as in Cincinnati 40 years ago, there will be troubles this summer.

In Cincinnati 40 years ago, we found that the business community had arranged with the newspapers that they wouldn’t print anything about their Committee of 28.  In other words, the papers agreed to censor the issue.

In the Free Times last week, Afi-Odelia Scruggs wrote about The Plain Dealer’s treatment of this era’s city problems.  She intercepted an editor’s memo about what the paper intended to do about the problems.

The metro editor in an e-mail, entitled “thugs and more,” wrote about the paper’s intentions dealing with the recent shooting of a black youth by another black with a concealed weapon during a robbery.

“That shooting… crystalized (sic) for many much that is wrong with the city. It captured the attention of people throughout Northeast Ohio, and it sparked all kinds of imaginative thinking in the newsroom.  Over the past few weeks, columnists and reporters have launched on stories to examine issues raised by the case, and many others proposed wide-ranging projects for the paper to undertake.”

It continued: “Our aim is to produce a series of stories and packages, to run through late fall, that ties together the many themes suggested in the … shooting.  The plan… requires a big investment of time, but the result promises to be unlike anything ever offered to readers of The Plain Dealer.”

I smell a recipe for disaster in an examination of symptoms, not the real problems.  And certainly not real solutions.