Thread: Detriot in Trouble

Meanwhile in Detroit, a reckoning
Decades of delusion deliver decimation.
Dan Calabrese on Monday June 17th, 2013

Rob and I try not to bombard you with stuff about Detroit. It's not your fault where we come from, and of course this site's focus is national. But if anyone interested in responsible government is not paying attention to what's happening in Detroit right now, they should start. The reckoning that is coming upon the Motor City is the inevitable result of any governance strategy that sees politicians conspire with government employees to erect a cushy array of benefits in exchange for never-ending campaign support.

I've never seen it done more blatantly, or taken to greater extremes, than in Detroit. But if you live in a state where Democratic elected officials sit across the table and "negotiate" with the same union bosses whose cash funds their campaigns, you should know what's coming down on Detroit. If you live in a country that has made absolutely impossible commitments of retirement security and free health care to generations of people without any conceivable notion how to pay for it - and oh by the way, that's all of you who live in the United States - you should know about Detroit's fate.

Here it is in a nutshell: Detroit had 1.8 million people as recently as the 1950s. Today it has just over 700,000. The city's decline essentially followed this pattern: Rising crime prompts people to head for the suburbs, giving rise to a corrupt and incompetent generation of leaders personified by Mayor Coleman A. Young, who ruled the city from 1973 through 1993, frequently denouncing neighboring suburbs as racist and hostile, all the while presiding over urban decay, police corruption, exploding drug crime and an average of a murder or so per day. Once Young finally left the scene, public employee unions were firmly in control of the city's politics. While most other major cities - even those run by Democrats - were making sensible moves toward privatization or regionalization of services, the powers-that-be in Detroit did not dare, lest they encounter the opposition of the unions.

Even as the city's tax base dwindled, the size of government did not. Detroit maintained an employment base of more than 12,000, most of whom were in line for generous retirement packages along with the many retirees of the city already collecting such benefits. Meanwhile, Detroit employees came to be represented by 48 different unions, one of which as recently as last year had only one member.

By 2005, under now-imprisoned Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the city began floating bonds just to pay for general operations and regular pension payments. Today, the city finds itself with a structural deficit of about $400 million a year, and accumulated debt and obligations totalling $14.9 billion. A few months ago, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder appointed emergency financial manager Kevyn Orr to take over the running of the city. This past weekend, Orr met with nearly 150 creditors and informed them they can either take pennies on the dollar or fight it out in what would be the largest Chapter 9 bankruptcy in the nation's history.

Meanwhile, the streetlights don't work, the garbage isn't picked up, police response times are the longest in the nation, the public schools are a disaster and adult illiteracy has been estimated at 47 percent.

On a brighter note, the Tigers are in first place.

How did Detroit get here? It got here because the protection of big government, of employees, of institutions, of politicians' power, became the be-all and end-all of Detroit's political class. Anyone with an ounce of sense in their heads could have seen the changes that were necessary to stave off this disaster. But Detroit's leaders did not want to hear it. They wanted to just keep doing what they were doing. Many times, neighboring communities or the state offered to partner in running things like Cobo Arena or Belle Isle, but Detroit's leaders treated every such overture as a racist invasion by the hostile white suburbs. Coleman Young's legacy truly lives.

Along the way, local media has been pretty timid about exposing what's really going on, since they too feared the accusations that would surely come from Detroit public officials. I'm not saying they covered up everything, but they haven't been clear until the last few years about just how bad the situation was. Maybe they were too dumb to understand it. I don't know.

So Detroit now faces the reckoning that will see many of its long-time institutions taken apart. Assets will be sold. Departments will disappear. They might even fire the horseshoer. Yeah. They really have one.

I actually think Orr's restructuring plans provide hope for a brighter future for the city, and God knows all of Michigan needs Detroit to stop being a perpetual disaster. But there will be a lot of pain along the way for the people who have spent years benefiting from these corrupt arrangements. And that's as it should be. Those people deserve the pain. The bigger question, though, is whether the voters of Detroit will do any better at electing serious leaders after Kevyn Orr - who does not even live in Michigan - has finished cleaning up the mess of the last bunch and goes back where he came from. Because if they don't, we could be right back here again in a decade or two.

http://www.caintv.com/meanwhile-in-detroit-a-reckoni




CNN plays “name that party” with this story. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/ken-she...com-omits-part

The list of corrupt Detroit area politicians is lengthy. The most recent include: http://www.freep.com/article/2013031...r-legal-issues

Monica Conyers: Former Detroit City Council member pleaded guilty in 2009 to federal bribery charges. She served 27 months in a federal prison and then several weeks in a halfway house before her release in January. She’s now on home confinement until May.

Alonzo Bates: Former Detroit City Council member convicted in 2006 of federal charges that he put relatives on the city payroll. Bates began his 33-month sentence in 2009.

Motown’s political honor roll continues here. http://www.freep.com/article/2013031...r-legal-issues

Trivia: The Latin phrase above the door leading out of Detroit’s City Hall translates to “See you on visiting day.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman...nicipal_Center

**Written by Doug Powers http://michellemalkin.com/2013/03/11...or-corruption/

Something is rotten in the city of Detroit
June 22, 2013.

Detroit, a city run by liberal Democrats for generations, continues to struggle. A post at the Economic Collapse Blog reminds us of just how far it’s fallen.

The following are some facts about Detroit that are absolutely mind-blowing...

1 - Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and in 1960 Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

2 - Over the past 60 years, the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.

3 - At this point, approximately 40 percent of all the streetlights in the city don't work.

4 - Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.

5 - 210 of the 317 public parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down.

6 - According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.

7 - Approximately one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

8 - Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.

9 - If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

10 - According to one very shocking report, 47 percent of the residents of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

11 - Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.

12 - Ten years ago, there were approximately 5,000 police officers in the city of Detroit. Today, there are only about 2,500 and another 100 are scheduled to be eliminated from the force soon.

13 - Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

14 - The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.

15 - Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to "enter Detroit at your own risk".

16 - Right now, the city of Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities. That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

As Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr noted last week, it took a very long time for Detroit to get into this condition...

“What the average Detroiter needs to understand is that where we are right now is a culmination of years and years and years of kicking the can down the road,” said Orr, adding that his proposal should not be seen as a “hostile act” but as a step in the right direction.

Does that sound familiar?

It should.

U.S. politicians have also been kicking the can down the road for "years and years and years".

But eventually you can't kick the can down the road anymore.

Sometimes it is helpful to step back and look at what we have done to ourselves over the past several decades.

For example, back in 1980 the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars. Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars.

And our debt binge has greatly accelerated under Barack Obama.

During Barack Obama's first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.

Isn't that insane?

In fact, if you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.

The following are a lot more facts about our exploding national debt from one of my previous articles entitled "55 Facts About The Debt And U.S. Government Finances That Every American Voter Should Know"...

#1 While Barack Obama has been president, the U.S. government has spent about 11 dollars for every 7 dollars of revenue that it has actually brought in.

#2 During the fiscal year that just ended, the U.S. government took in 2.449 trillion dollars but it spent 3.538 trillion dollars.

#3 During fiscal year 2011, over a trillion dollars of government money was spent on 83 different welfare programs, and those numbers do not even include Social Security or Medicare.

#4 Over the past four years, welfare spending has increased by 32 percent. In inflation-adjusted dollars, spending on those programs has risen by 378 percent over the past 30 years. At this point, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. Once again, these figures do not even include Social Security or Medicare.

#5 Over the past year, the number of Americans getting a free cell phone from the federal government has grown by 43 percent. Now more than 16 million Americans are enjoying what has come to be known as an "Obamaphone".

#6 When Barack Obama first entered the White House, about 32 million Americans were on food stamps. Now, 47 million Americans are on food stamps. And this has happened during what Obama refers to as "an economic recovery".

#7 The U.S. government recently spent 27 million dollars on pottery classes in Morocco.

#8 The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently spent $300,000 to encourage Americans to eat caviar at a time when more families than ever are having a really hard time just trying to put any food on the table at all.

#9 During 2012, the National Science Foundation spent $516,000 to support the creation of a video game called "Prom Week", which apparently simulates "all the social interactions of the event."

#10 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the largest snack food maker in the world (PepsiCo Inc.) a total of 1.3 million dollars in corporate welfare that was used to help build "a Greek yogurt factory in New York."

#11 The National Science Foundation recently gave researchers at Purdue University $350,000. They used part of that money to help fund a study that discovered that if golfers imagine that a hole is bigger it will help them with their putting.

#12 If you can believe it, $10,000 from the federal government was actually used to purchase talking urinal cakes up in Michigan.

#13 The National Science Foundation recently gave a whopping $697,177 to a New York City-based theater company to produce a musical about climate change.

#14 The National Institutes of Health recently gave $666,905 to a group of researchers that is studying the benefits of watching reruns on television.

#15 The National Science Foundation has given 1.2 million dollars to a team of "scientists" that is spending part of that money on a study that is seeking to determine whether elderly Americans would benefit from playing World of Warcraft or not.

#16 The National Institutes of Health recently gave $548,731 to a team of researchers that concluded that those that drink heavily in their thirties also tend to feel more immature.

#17 The National Science Foundation recently spent $30,000 on a study to determine if "gaydar" actually exists. This is the conclusion that the researchers reached at the end of the study...

"Gaydar is indeed real and… its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features"
#18 Back in 2011, the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.

#19 The U.S. government spends more on the military than China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined. In fact, the United States accounts for 41.0% of all military spending on the planet. China is next with only 8.2%.

#20 In a previous article, I noted that close to 500,000 federal employees now make at least $100,000 a year.

#21 In 2006, only 12 percent of all federal workers made $100,000 or more per year. Now, approximately 22 percent of all federal workers do.

#22 If you can believe it, there are 77,000 federal workers that make more than the governors of their own states do.

#23 During 2010, the average federal employee in the Washington D.C. area received total compensation worth more than $126,000.

#24 The U.S. Department of Defense had just nine civilians earning $170,000 or more back in 2005. When Barack Obama became president, the U.S. Department of Defense had 214 civilians earning $170,000 or more. By June 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense had 994 civilians earning $170,000 or more.

#25 During 2010, compensation for federal employees came to a grand total of approximately 447 billion dollars.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a...ook-at-detroit

wait ... there's more ....

#26 If you can believe it, close to 15,000 retired federal employees are currently collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. That list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.

#27 During 2010, the federal government spent $33,387 on the hair care needs of U.S. Senators.

#28 During 2010, U.S. Senators pulled $72,370 out of the "Senate Restaurant Fund".

#29 During 2010, an average of $4,005,900 of U.S. taxpayer money was spent on "personal" and "office" expenses per Senator.

#30 In 2013, 3.7 million dollars will be spent to support the lavish lifestyles of former presidents such as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

#31 During 2011, the federal government spent a total of 1.4 BILLION dollars just on the Obamas.

#32 When you combine all federal government spending, all state government spending and all local government spending, it comes to approximately 41 percent of U.S. GDP. But don't worry, all of our politicians insist that this is not socialism.

#33 As I have written about previously, less than 30 percent of all Americans lived in a home where at least one person received financial assistance from the federal government back in 1983. Today, that number is sitting at an all-time high of 49 percent.

#34 Back in 1990, the federal government accounted for just 32 percent of all health care spending in America. This year, it is being projected that the federal government will account for more than 50 percent of all health care spending in the United States.

#35 The number of Americans on Medicaid soared from 34 million in 2000 to 54 million in 2011, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

#36 In one of my previous articles, I discussed how it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.

#37 If you can believe it, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.

#38 In the United States today, more than 61 million Americans receive some form of Social Security benefits. By 2035, that number is projected to soar to a whopping 91 million.

#39 Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.

#40 When Barack Obama first took office, the U.S. national debt was about 10.6 trillion dollars. Now it is about 16.7 trillion dollars. That is an increase of 6.1 trillion dollars in a little more than 4 years.

#41 The federal government has now run a budget deficit of more than a trillion dollars for four years in a row.

#42 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#43 If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

#44 Some suggest that "taxing the rich" is the answer. Well, if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#45 If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations do, the real federal budget deficit for 2011 would have been 5 trillion dollars instead of 1.3 trillion dollars.

#46 The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does.

#47 At this point, the United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.

#48 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.

#49 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.

#50 The U.S. national debt is now more than 37 times larger than it was when Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard.

#51 The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.

#52 The U.S. national debt jumped more on the very first day of fiscal year 2013 than it did from 1776 to 1941 combined.

#53 Historically, the interest rate on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has averaged 6.68 percent. If the average interest rate on U.S. government debt rose to that level today, the U.S. government would find itself spending more than a trillion dollars per year just on interest on the national debt.

#54 A recently revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.

#55 Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff is warning that the U.S. government is facing a gigantic tsunami of unfunded liabilities in the coming years that we are counting on our children and our grandchildren to pay. Kotlikoff speaks of a "fiscal gap" which he defines as "the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue". His calculations have led him to the conclusion that the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 222 trillion dollars in the years ahead.

Please share this article with as many people as you can. We are in the process of committing national financial suicide and time is rapidly running out to do anything about it.

Just like Detroit, a day is rapidly approaching when America will not be able to kick the can down the road anymore.

Sadly, our politicians don't seem inclined to do anything about it and most of the population seems to think that our exploding national debt is not a significant problem.

By the time it becomes clear how wrong they were, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a...ook-at-detroit


this isn't the whole article ... go read the rest ....

Detroit bankruptcy first step in 'restoring the city'
State-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr on Thursday asked a federal judge for permission to place the city into Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection.
4 hr ago |By Nick Carey of Reuters

DETROIT – Detroit filed the largest-ever municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history on Thursday, marking a new low for a city that was the cradle of the U.S. automotive industry and setting the stage for a costly court battle with creditors. Following the filing, Detroit's emergency financial manager, Kevyn Orr, said bankruptcy is the "first step toward restoring the city."

The filing put the city on an uncertain course that could mean laying off municipal employees, selling off assets, raising fees and scaling back basic services such as trash collection and snow plowing, which have already been slashed. Orr says it will be business as usual in Detroit. He says the city will stay open and bills will be paid.

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing says he didn't want the city to go bankrupt, but now that it's happened, the people of the city "have to make the best of it."

In a letter accompanying the filing, Michigan's Governor Rick Snyder said he had approved a request from Orr to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection noting, "Detroit simply cannot raise enough revenue to meet its current obligations, and that is a situation that is only projected to get worse absent a bankruptcy filing."

Snyder, a Republican, named Orr in March to tackle the city's spiraling long-term debt, which is estimated at $18.5 billion.

Detroit was once synonymous with U.S. manufacturing prowess. Its automotive giants switched production to planes, tanks and munitions during World War Two, earning the city the nickname of the "Arsenal of Democracy."

Now the city's name has become synonymous with decline, decay and crime. Detroit has seen its population fall to 700,000 from a peak of 1.8 million people in 1950. The city's government has been beset by corruption cases over the years. Waning investment in street lights and emergency services has left it struggling to police the streets.

The city's murder rate is at its highest in nearly 40 years; only a third of its ambulances were in service in the first quarter of 2013; and its nearly 78,000 abandoned buildings create "additional public safety problems and reduces the quality of life in the city," the governor noted in his letter.

In June, Orr presented a proposal to creditors offering them pennies on the dollar. His plan had met with resistance from some creditors, most notably Detroit's two pension funds representing retired city workers. The funds recently filed lawsuits in a state court challenging the governor's ability to authorize Orr to file for bankruptcy.

Creditors are expected to mount a stiff challenge to the bankruptcy, which was filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Michigan.

Douglas Bernstein, a bankruptcy attorney at Plunkett Cooney in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, said he expected the case would last one-to-three years and would be very costly. "This could run to tens-of-millions to hundreds-of-millions of dollars," he said



http://news.msn.com/us/detroit-bankr...oring-the-city


Is Obama's change coming into focus for you ?


The largest major city to declare chapter 9... The problem - govt employee union pensions...

This city is America's canary in the mineshaft... this is our future with unsustainable socialism ... investment flees leaving only dependent, purchased voters. Only countries can't declare bankruptcy... they fail and collapse into chaos...

Hot new legal consideration: Does it honor President Obama?
By Doug Powers • July 20, 2013 11:50 AM



Yesterday, Michigan Ingham Country Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie Aquilina ruled that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing must be withdrawn because it is in her opinion unconstitutional (in Michigan, “reality is unconstitutional” http://news.investors.com/ibd-editor...fromcampaign=1 ).

Before issuing her ruling, Aquilina said this: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2...huette-appeals

“It’s cheating, sir, and it’s cheating good people who work,” the judge told assistant state Attorney General Brian Devlin. “It’s also not honoring the (United States) president, who took (Detroit’s auto companies) out of bankruptcy.”

The state court’s equivalent of Chris Matthews also remarked that she’d make sure President Obama received a copy of her order and that “I know he’s watching this.” http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...ring-president So much for the separation of powers — take that, Montesquieu.

Yesterday, Obama backers argued that the city of Detroit and the U.S. automakers that received bailouts are not synonymous. http://www.gotnewswire.com/news/tyle...resident-obama If that’s the case, they might want to have a chat with this judge.


**Written by Doug Powers http://michellemalkin.com/2013/07/20...esident-obama/

Obama didn't take anyone out of bankruptcy - he was part of the 110th Congress that started the economic implosion which has run, unabated, since early '08.

And know what? If Aquilina'd said that the filing doesn't honor the American Taxpayers, the GM/Chrysler stockholders, creditors and non-union automaker employees - all of whom have paid dearly, contributing to the tune of TENS OF BILLION$ in an attempt to keep "Detroit" out of bankruptcy - while that would be just as legally specious, it would at least have been factually honest and morally defensible.

As President, Obama had his unelected grandees hold a gun to the heads of the above, bragged about it afterward - just as he did when Other People took out bin Laden - and has been collecting million$ in campaign cash from the UAW, et al., ever since.

...

Detroit is bankrupt! What took so long to admit that? It is the end result of too much spending and no accountability. Those who created the mess still aren't being honest. Socialist dem policies drove the city to implode. Politicians fail to grasp that the public has no obligation to continue to be skewered by bad policies. Talent and wealth creators were driven from that city as they will be driven out of all other socialist dem controlled areas. Why work hard to produce something when idiots will come along and waste it on their career advancement. Dems you own this, all of this. Bankruptcy is the fruit of your labor and your selfishness. Now own it!

Sally Kohn: Detroit ‘set up to fail’ by racially biased policies
Posted at 10:32 pm on July 22, 2013 by Twitchy Staff

Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke

Democrats should take Sally Kohn's message about Detroit and run with it in 2014.

6:26 PM - 22 Jul 2013

What is Sally Kohn’s message about Detroit? Not everyone who heard it tonight on Fox News’ “Special Report” is quite sure, because it sounded as though she was blaming the GOP’s platform of cutting taxes and government spending for Detroit’s descent into bankruptcy — or at the very least suggesting that Republican policies would force more cities to go the way of Detroit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=_5wxupZKkV0

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg was among those who couldn’t quite place when it was that the GOP imposed crippling austerity programs on a city that’s been under Democrat control for six decades.

Jonah Goldberg ✔ @JonahNRO

Still trying to get my head around Sally Kohn's argument on @SpecialReport
that Detroit is an example of the failure of "austerity."

6:00 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Brian Faughnan @BrianFaughnan

@JonahNRO she also said the de-investment in Detroit in recent decades is everyone's fault. @RBPundit

6:12 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Sally Kohn @sallykohn

@guypbenson @JonahNRO I didn't argue that austerity (in trad sense) caused Detroit
but rather being (wrongly) used to advance austerity

6:25 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Sally Kohn @sallykohn

@JonahNRO Detroit not anti-austerity example,
but example of 60 yrs of divestment
from biz & govt (GOP & Dem) policies; suburbanization

8:01 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Jonah Goldberg ✔ @JonahNRO

.@sallykohn "divestment" is loaded word.
Detroit 1 of richest cities in country 50 years ago.
"Blowing it" and "divestment" not synonymous.

8:19 PM - 22 Jul 2013

There’s your proof: an article by Maya Wiley, founder and president of the Center for Social Inclusion, posted on The Grio, MSNBC’s site offering “the African-American perspective on the news.” The two factors behind Detroit’s bankruptcy? Race and disinvestment, writes Wiley.

Jonah Goldberg ✔ @JonahNRO

You've got to be kidding me
RT @sallykohn: .@JonahNRO meet @mayawiley:
http://thegrio.com/2013/07/20/the-ro...ts-bankruptcy/

8:48 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Jonah Goldberg ✔ @JonahNRO
.@sallykohn Among other problems,
it assumes that Detroit's problems
were somehow intended
which is insane.

8:55 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Sally Kohn @sallykohn

@JonahNRO don't think intentionality is ascribed here -
- to say something has racially biased IMPACT
doesn't = racist intent.

8:58 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Jonah Goldberg ✔ @JonahNRO

@sallykohn it isn't ascribed but it is implied.
Detroit didn't fail because of racism.

9:07 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Sally Kohn @sallykohn

@JonahNRO "racism" is a loaded word;
i would say detroit was set up to fail
by legacy of racially biased policies/practices,
depleted city

9:09 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Jonah Goldberg ✔ @JonahNRO

.@sallykohn the 2 reasons she offers are "race & disinvestment."
The rest is about the "race line."
Reads like charging racism.

9:14 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Yeah, it really does. How about the conclusion that “racial fairness has to be at the center of all of the solutions to starving cities or we will ignore the roots of the problem”?

Jonah Goldberg ✔ @JonahNRO

.@sallykohn also conventional left argument is that disparate impact = racist.
If you want to drop that, great by me.

9:15 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Jonah Goldberg ✔ @JonahNRO

.@sallykohn
the whole article brims with loaded words,
starting with disinvestment,
which is where we started.

9:16 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Will Ricciardella @WillRicci

@JonahNRO @sallykohn the Divestment of capital was a symptom of statist policies
-not the cause #basiceconomics #sowell

8:37 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Sean Agnew @seanagnew

Decades of Dem & Union leadership
@sallykohn: @JonahNRO
Detroit systematically starved of jobs,
tax base and public investment over decades

6:50 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Jim Treacher @jtLOL

@sallykohn @JonahNRO
That's not austerity. That's @TheDemocrats.

6:59 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Bon Hagar @BonHagar

@sallykohn @JonahNRO
As a lifelong MI resident of Detroit's burbs,
i think you should study Coleman Young's legacy
& get back to us.

9:14 PM - 22 Jul 2013

@Jeff_Ellington1 @Jeff_Ellington1

@sallykohn @JonahNRO #detroit has be run by #democrats
since the early 1950s, show me
where they put "austerity" measures in place...

9:11 PM - 22 Jul 2013

The Captain @HeistheGiambino

@sallykohn it certainly has nothing to do with defined pensions
and retiree health care costs.
You reap, what you effin sow

9:08 PM - 22 Jul 2013

Retired728 @retired728

@foxnation Sally Kohn is the poster child for the Dem Party line.

8:40 PM - 22 Jul 2013

http://twitchy.com/2013/07/22/sally-...ased-policies/

http://twitchy.com/2013/07/22/sally-...ased-policies/

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

Having solved all other problems, Detroit’s City Council calls for
... a federal investigation of George Zimmerman

Posted at 9:08 pm on July 24, 2013 by Twitchy Staff

John Hayward @Doc_0

Detroit city council issues proclamation for Zimmerman civil rights trial.
Hopefully their proclamation paper was seized & sold at auction.

12:14 PM - 24 Jul 2013

We were going to suggest that this is the Detroit City Council’s way of pointing and yelling “squirrel,” except it wouldn’t be remotely believable because all of the squirrels moved out several years ago.

Believe it or not, having just become the country’s largest municipal bankruptcy in history and with no other more pressing issues at hand, the Detroit City Council passed a resolution calling for a federal investigation of George Zimmerman.


For many Twitter users, this only helps further explain what’s happened to Detroit, and why:

David Limbaugh @DavidLimbaugh

If this doesn't illustrate who liberals are: Detroit City Council calls for cvil rights investigation vs. Zimmerman
http://www.freep.com/article/20130723/NEWS01/307230095/ …

12:08 PM - 24 Jul 2013

Michael Johns @michaeljohns

48 hours after declaring bankruptcy,
what is #Detroit City Council doing?
Demanding George Zimmerman investigation:
http://goo.gl/SGkilS

3:23 PM - 24 Jul 2013

Tanner @Brumbarger

20 Billion in debt, what does the city council of Detroit do?
Attempt to launch an investigation into George Zimmerman.
http://bit.ly/13bIBmd

6:15 PM - 24 Jul 2013

http://twitchy.com/2013/07/24/having...rge-zimmerman/


SQUIRREL !!

Detroit stands as an extreme example of how an Obama tax system of “spreading the wealth” (actually, confiscating it) inevitably means that since there is not enough rich and business people’s money to create a utopia of income equality -- government must inevitably tax middle income people, too.

Why Obama doesn't dare speak about Detroit
By Jon Kraushar - Published July 29, 2013
FoxNews.com


Does President Obama dare take the latest version of his revive-the-economy-and-boost-the-middle-class speech to the poster city for the bankruptcy of his ideas: Detroit?

Don’t bet on it.

You don’t hear the president talking about Detroit. Maybe the reason Detroit is bankrupt today is because for decades it was governed, in large part, by the Obama playbook: Soak the rich, choke small businesses, and squeeze the middle class with high taxes (in the case of Detroit that included sky high property, commercial and industrial taxes).

Out of control taxing and spending by government in Detroit was one reason a staggering 25 percent of the city’s population moved out between 2000 and 2010.

A study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2011 found that Detroit had the highest property taxes among the 50 largest U.S. cities on homes, apartment buildings, commercial buildings, and industrial buildings.

Yet President Obama keeps saying that he wants to tax the wealthy and businesses much more across the country to redistribute income to the middle class, the poor, and government.

Detroit tried that (with most of the money going down the government spending rat hole instead of to its citizens).


Detroit stands as an extreme example of how an Obama tax system of “spreading the wealth” (actually, confiscating it) inevitably means that since there is not enough rich and business people’s money to create a utopia of income equality -- government must inevitably tax middle income people, too.

Worse, most of the money ends up in government’s coffers where it gets misspent and siphoned to special interests—instead of in the pockets of citizens whose spending and investing stimulates economic and job growth.

Here's how that works: Insure that unions and government workers get generous pension, health and other benefit packages that government can’t fund, long-term, in exchange for their votes and political activism.


According to the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, “Fully 99.6% of [Detroit’s] retiree health-care liabilities are unfunded” and…“unfunded obligations account for $9.2 billion of Detroit’s $18 billion debt.”

Shortly before President Obama delivered his nearly 8,000-word “economic success” speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois last week (without once mentioning the word “Detroit”) Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of Obama’s home city of Chicago, Illinois by three notches. This was largely because Moody’s calculated Chicago’s unfunded liabilities at $36-billion—nearly double of what the Windy City reported.

Looking at other cities across the country, Moody’s estimates that cities are using accounting gimmicks to disguise their true unfunded government pension liabilities, which Moody’s says are three times as bad as those cities are reporting. But if President Obama would dare to talk about this in Detroit (or in Chicago, for that matter), he would alienate unions and government workers who are among his biggest backers.

Instead, government officials strive to sell the power of big government to be the savior when it comes to major economic and social problems.

Detroit’s mayors over the past 30 years tried various forms of government intervention to invigorate the city but clearly that failed. As Steve Malanga recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, as early as the 1970’s, when Coleman Young was Detroit’s mayor, “the increasingly distressed city became a fiscal ward of the state and federal governments…by the late 1970s federal grants paid the salaries of up to one-third of Detroit's workforce.”

As Detroit continued to demonstrate over the years, government bailouts only forestall problems that only responsible individuals must solve.

Mr. Obama did dare to speak of his economic vision in Detroit, in 2007, just a few months after he declared his first bid for the presidency.

At the Detroit Economic Club, Obama said, “I believe in America's great cities. I believe in America's great Midwestern cities. We have not had an urban agenda over the last six years. We need to restore an urban agenda.”

He cited as his top priorities: education, “innovative ways that the federal government can spark economic development,” and then touched on the topics of affordable housing and jobs.

Obama added that, “Obviously, the marketplace is the best engine of job growth.”

In the six years since Obama spoke those words—and six months into his second term as president—President Obama is still campaigning as if big government can fix major economic and social problems in all the areas he cited as his priorities when he spoke at the Detroit Economic Club.

But the Obama administration’s role in bailing out Detroit’s auto industry didn’t “save Detroit”—certainly not the city.

While Obama pushes for even more big government taxing and spending, here’s what we see:

- Failed schools, especially in the minority neighborhoods of big cities.

- Real GDP growth that is limping along at barely over one percent.

- When it comes to affordable housing and job growth, Obama is long on claiming credit and short on producing results.

While the Obama playbook continues to play out in Detroit and elsewhere, the president continues to speak as if he and his administration are on the right track.

If the president ever does dare to speak in Detroit, expect from him what he accuses his critics of: “an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals.”

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/...about-detroit/

Chinese investors start gobbling up cheap Detroit houses
Lured by homes selling for as low as $100 each,
investors are beginning to buy up dozens of properties at one time.
by Steve Neavling / 3 days ago



As Detroit plunges into bankruptcy, Chinese investors looking for good bargains are lining up to buy cheap houses and other real estate. ured by homes selling for as low as $100, investors are beginning to gobble up dozens of properties at one time. “I have people calling and saying, ‘I’m serious – I wanna buy 100, 200 properties,’” Caroline Chen, a real estate broker, told Quartz.

Much of the hype followed a Chinese report that pointed out that houses in Detroit could be purchased for the price of leather shoes.

So what does this mean for Detroit?

Real estate brokers said most investors don’t plan on moving from China and likely will hold unto the properties until the city sees a resurgence, which raises questions about how they plan to maintain the properties in the meantime.

The city has more than 80,000 vacant houses and other buildings that drive down property values, attract arsonists and provide cover for criminals.

http://motorcitymuckraker.com/2013/0...es-in-detroit/

Click here to see a photo gallery of Detroit’s cheap abandoned houses. http://wp.me/p2BK9P-2kx


comments

This is not good. We have more than enough trouble already from suburban slumlords, who don't maintain their properties, handle their tenants, or pay taxes. We have more trouble yet from the City of Detroit, which also owns numerous blighted, dangerous, vacant properties in our neighborhoods.