-By Warner Todd Huston
Ruins of Detroit after decades of Democrat control
Well, the bills have come due and Detroit has gone from Motor City to Tap City declaring bankruptcy, the largest U.S. city to ever do so. This is what Barack Obama wants to turn the whole country into, folks.
Not long ago the state of Michigan passed a law to give power over troubled city budgets to what is called “an emergency financial manager” and Detroit had been under the guidance of EFM Kevyn Orr for some time. But Orr has essentially admitted defeat by recommending that the former auto-making powerhouse file for Chapter 9 protection.
Orr reported to the state legislature that the city was upwards to $20 billion (yeah, “billion” with a “b”) in debt and that it wasn’t possible to make good on that debt.
(Meanwhile, our bailed out auto industry is now outsourcing to China! Nice, eh?)
In a letter appended to the filing, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said, “The citizens of Detroit need and deserve a clear road out of the cycle of ever-decreasing services.”
“The city’s creditors, as well as its many dedicated public servants, deserve to know what promises the city can and will keep. The only way to do those things is to radically restructure the city and allow it to reinvent itself without the burden of impossible obligations,” the Governor wrote.
Maybe someone should have thought of that before the Democrats got the city mired in un-payable debt?
One of the reasons that Detroit is in such dire shape (well, besides that Democrats have controlled her fate for so long) is that most of the city’s citizens have fled.
As the UK Daily Mail reports, “The city lost a quarter of a million residents between 2000 and 2010. A population that, in the 1950s, reached 1.8 million is struggling to stay above 700,000.”
Ouch.
So, most of the tax base is gone. Most businesses, especially small businesses, and the middle class have evaporated in the Motor City. Now it is left with grasping unionized city workers none of whom have any poor taxpaying suckers to float their exorbitant salaries, healthcare and pension bennies.
Detroit could be forced to sell off city-owned assets to try and make up some of the debt it owes, of course, but, seriously, who would want anything from or in Detroit? The whole city is like a scene from a bombed out WWII city!
You may remember back during the late presidential election cycle that Mitt Romney criticized Obama for failing to “save Detroit.”
Detroit politicians are trying to get a bailout from the federal government, naturally, but so far Obama has turned a deaf ear to such pleas. A bailout, though, would be a bad, bad idea. After all, what would the taxpayers of the United States of America be getting for helping Detroit out of the mess its own politicians got the city into? And if there are bailouts, why would any city officials act any differently than Detroit’s did? I mean, if there are no consequences, why knock yourself out to manage you city better?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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