Detroit As A Stand In For America

19 Jul, 2013 by William Teach

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In noting this article by Walter Russell Mead, Ace notes that Mead keeps typing “Detroit” instead of “America”

Obama to Detroit: Drop Dead

This is where blue governance has brought Detroit in the end: not even a liberal Democratic administration will step in to save the pensions of thousands of public workers and African Americans, condemning countless innocents to having their pensions and health benefits gutted in bankruptcy court.

Detroit has been spending on average $100 million more than it has taken in for each of the past five years. The city’s $11 billion in unsecured debt includes $6 billion in health and other retirement benefits and $3 billion in retiree pensions for its 20,000 city pensioners, who are slated to receive less than 10 percent of what they were promised. Between 2007 and 2011, an astounding 36 percent of residents lived below the poverty line. Last year, the FBI cited Detroit as having the highest violent crime rate for any major American city. In the first 12 years of the new century, Detroit lost more than 26 percent of its population.

Progressive politicians, wonks, and activists can only blame big corporations and other liberal bogeymen for so long. The truth is that corrupt machine politics in a one-party system devoted to the blue social model wrecked an entire city and thousands of lives beyond repair. The sooner blues come to terms with this reality, the greater chance other cities will have of avoiding Detroit’s fate.

And Lefties will blame everything but Blue politics in the days and months to come. Detroit has been run almost solely by Democrats for 51 years. It’s a model for Blue politics and policies, and we see how well they work. One of the people in the comments at the story attempts to yammer on about no one knows what “blue governance” is, and, hey, look at the educational state of Southern states. Interestingly, the states and cities in the worst financial plights tend to be in Blue states. Those that have been going bankrupt or close to are in Blue areas.

The problem going forward is that no one wants to move to Detroit. Their tax base has eroded to almost negligible. Their tax rates are some of the highest in the country by a large margin. If Detroit was a private company, they’d simply be shut down, their limited assets sold off, and thrown on the dust heap of Bad Ideas, like the Edsel, New Coke, Subprime mortgages, Ford Pinto, Betamax, and Agent Orange.

David Freddoso provides lots and lots and lots of depressing facts about America, er, Detroit.

Lots of Lefties are agitating for a federal bailout of Detroit. They’re also blamestorming Republicans, Reagan, deflecting, wailing, gnashing, moonbating, but what they aren’t doing is introspection of their own policies, with the intent to come to grips that the first step in admitting you have a problem is admitting you have a problem.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.