Liberal to Conservative: I realized that liberal policies don't work as advertised. I felt like they weren't efficient for the money that was going into it and nobody would address this concern. They would just want to throw more money into it. I also was concerned with the scope of what I'd call tyrannical government, even in areas dominated by liberals. I learned that these things were not a conservative problem, but a politician problem.

Conservative to moderate: I lived in a wealthy-ish neighborhood all my life. I wasn't surrounded by dysfunction or poverty really. Sure, I went to a state-funded daycare, but most of the kids there were still not what you see in the inner cities. They were tame, but I thought at the time that they were the kids who would become the worst of the worst.

I moved this past year to the ghetto. All the things I thought I knew about people being able to pull their own shit together I learned was wrong. I was raised in poverty, but my parents were strong upper middle class when they were growing up. They were educated, and they had no real dysfunction. I wasn't raised in a home where parents lacked the discipline themselves to be consistent, and they knew which resources existed to help me when I needed it.

A good number of people don't have that. Most of the people I've befriended here grew up in an environment where going to jail was a regular occurrence. It was something you did. The regulation of emotions is a marked difference between the "middle class skipped a generation" poor or the immigrant poor.

Some of these people I am friends with, I'm the only person who they've hung out in their lives who has a college degree. How can you expect your kids to go to college when they have so few examples to associate with in their day-to-day life who can guide them in that direction? Often times the teachers in the schools these kids go to don't provide it.

So, I became a lot less conservative by viewing the experiences. Now, I'm still supportive of efficiency, but we really need to target these kids who face generational poverty and help them make those better choices. The best way to go about that is for cities to work on planning better. People are a product of their environments, and if you throw all the dysfunctional people in one spot, you're going to have a dysfunctional society be the results. If you spread them out and instead of having a ghetto school and a nice school, you have two decent schools, society will be better as a whole.

The reason I don't call myself a liberal is because I don't think money is the solution, higher taxes aren't a solution. You can throw all the money in the world into the ghetto and they'll still be struggling. Why? The same reason most people who win the big lottery jackpots blow it within a couple years.