http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/opinion/come-see-detroit-americas-future.html?_r=0 Come See Detroit, America’s Future By CHARLIE LeDUFF DETROIT — I KNOW an old woman who hasn’t opened her windows in a decade, afraid that what’s outside will climb inside. Inside, there is the stale odor of dead air. I know another woman who called me about a corpse lying outside her window for six and a half hours. This was because of cutbacks at the morgue. No dignity in death here. They do it better in Baghdad. The latest trend? When a person is murdered, he is thrown into an abandoned house, and it is set on fire. There are tens of thousands to choose from. I know of an 11-year-old boy who was shot, the bullet going clean through his arm. The cops stuffed him in the back of a squad car and rushed him to the hospital. That’s how we do it. There was no ambulance available. About two-thirds of the city’s fleet is broken on an average day. I know a cop who drives around in a squad car with holes in the floorboards. There is no computer, no air-conditioning, the odometer reading 147,000 miles. His bulletproof vest has expired. His pay has been cut 10 percent. I knew a firefighter who died in a fire, but not from the fire. He died when the roof of an abandoned house collapsed on him and his brethren could not find him because his homing alarm was broken and did not sound. He suffocated. In our town, the 911 dispatch system recently went down for 15 hours, and no one seemed to give a damn. When the system is running, the average wait is 58 minutes. Firefighters can’t use hydraulic ladders on fire trucks to do their jobs unless there is an “immediate threat to life.” In a fire — imagine that. The ladders haven’t been inspected in years. If this were New York, these stories would have ricocheted around the world. But this is Detroit and, of course, nobody gives a damn. Even here people have been conditioned to accept these things as normal, a nuisance, the buzz of a fly. This numbness, in a peculiar way, is a sign of strength. People here manage to get along somehow. So we went broke, bust, bankrupt. We’ve known that in Detroit for years. Only now it is official with a Chapter 9 filing last week. The biggest municipal default in United States history — at least $18 billion. Suddenly, America gives a rip. How did it get this way, I’m asked? After all, it was just 99 years ago that Henry Ford offered the workingman $5 a day and profit-sharing. How, in less than a century, did it come to this? The short answers: municipal mismanagement, race riots, white flight, black flight, dead flight (people routinely disinter their deceased and relocate them to the suburbs). There were the overreaching unions and management that couldn’t balance a ball. Proof? The multibillion-dollar bailout of the auto industry. Thank you, American taxpayers! Then there is our spectacular civic corruption: A former mayor, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, waits for a bed in federal prison, convicted of extortion, racketeering and bribery. He looted the city of millions of dollars and stole the future of thousands of children. They can send him to hell for all I care. I don’t want to pay for his upkeep. But thank you, taxpayers! You will pay for it. And the ex-mayor’s team of super lawyers will also be paid with the public dime. So Detroit files for bankruptcy. What does this mean? Pay close attention because it may be coming to you soon, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia. In 2011, Moody’s calculated the unfunded liabilities for Illinois’s three largest state-run pension plans to be $133 billion. (It is expected to be even larger this year.) That’s the size of six Detroit bankruptcies — give or take a few hundred million. Of Detroit’s debt of at least $18 billion, about $7 billion is secured by collateral like casino revenues and utility taxes. That means creditors — read: big banks — will get paid. Of the remaining $11 billion dollars or so in unsecured debt, about $9 billion is owed to retirees and current municipal workers, people like firefighters and police officers. These debts come in the form of promised pension checks and health care benefits, all backed by a false, unsecured promise. These are the people who are likely to lose out. In simple math, do we sacrifice 30,000 former and current workers to save a city of 700,000 people and their progeny? Most Detroiters will tell you yes. Don’t judge. We feel bad about it. But we’re simply Americans. We are a gaunt dog. We are desperate. And you are watching and studying us. Pension checks will be much smaller than planned and health care benefits will get foisted off on Medicaid and Obamacare. Thanks again, taxpayers! There is hope up here on the Great Lakes. We have fresh water, profitable auto companies, more than $130 billion a year in trade with Canada crossing through our city, a world-class research university and, eventually, a clean balance sheet. Hey, it helps to be first. What do you have, Atlanta? So come visit Detroit, my fellow Americans. Come take a look at your future. Come give the tires a kick. And if you want your money back, come strip copper pipes and wiring from the abandoned buildings — if you can find any copper. Chances are, someone beat you to it. Charlie LeDuff, a reporter at the TV station WJBK and a former New York Times correspondent, is the author of “Detroit: An American Autopsy.”
Ya know, this may sound a bit heartless but people get what they vote for. They wanted progressive liberalism and unions running the show and now they have the logical result. See what the Obama administration has done to our budget in the first 6 months in office. That's not to excuse the 4 before him, but he had a clear shot at righting the ship with an all democrat congress and no cloture. People get what they vote for.
yep. Create a budget based upon 1.8M people, destroy the industry in the area, watch busineses and people evacuate as the ship sinks. Population now rests at what? 700K and not a fraction of the tax base available? yeah..keep over spending, america..print a few more dollars, barry..
The one glaring difference between Detroit and other cities it's size is that Detroit is 81% African American.
...hemp would actually save the auto industry (and the world for that matter) as Henry Ford originally intended, just saying
I like how you guys are totally forgetting this issue started long before Obama was in office and it's not like any president could've saved detroit from itself. but neat cliches and easy talking points are fun.
when oboma took office, it was just shy of 10T, Denny has the 3T figure that may close,so to double the debt in 8 years..or worse..and you would place the blame elsewhere?. http://nation.foxnews.com/president...s-adding-4-trillion-national-debt-unpatriotic
You know, I could go on and on, posting for hours about how the Obama administration completely fucked over the automobile industry. This is a topic that I've lived and have inside knowledge about. I know where the corrupt ties were and how they were exploited, but I really don't come on here to post about subjects like politics, business, or religion. I just come on here to post about basketball and occasionally be a drunk idiot that talks about miscellaneous bullshit. With that said, I'll just say this and be gone from this thread (and I'd love to go toe-to-toe in an argument with any of ya'll, but it's not really worth the time I spend on s2... this is my "unwinding" time) - Ford Motor Company did not take a federal bail out, yet Ford Motor Company has been the most successful of all American auto manufacturers, continuing to post record profits and hit record stock prices, in wake of the "collapse."
Denny's premise is that when Obama saved General Motors, a BUSINESS, he drove Detroit, a MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT, into bankruptcy. Apples and oranges. Also, both the business and the city were in financial trouble as soon as Japanese cars took the lead in the U.S. That occurred early in the Reagan administration, when Reagan started the enormous trade deficits, far far bigger than under Carter, a vastly superior economic leader.
Detroit is both a bellwether and a warning. Walter Russell Mead refers to the reasons for the collapse as "The Blue Model". What has happened with Detroit will be coming soon to a city near you. The public employee benefit system is unsustainable. What happens with Detroit will become precedent for every other municipality or even state in the future. I hear people saying, "It's only $18B, which in the large scheme of things is chicken feed". However, this isn't about Detroit. It's about California, Illinois and New York State, whose liabilities run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. My suggestion for the public employees is a compromise. These public employees were contributing to a pension system instead of having Social Security withheld. While some of that situation is their own fault, the real blame lies with the corrupt governments and unions for which they worked and belonged. I would propose that whatever the salary/FICA contributions would be, the American people fund that amount. Instead of having their comparatively lavish public retirement benefits, we fund what the equivalent Social Security benefit would be. They would also be put into the Medicaid system. It will be much smaller retirement benefit than they would have received, but at least it won't be zero. Hopefully we can learn from this situation and right the public employee ship. This isn't just a city problem. It's a problem at every level of government. We need to address it before the problem becomes too large, too systemic to correct. It will mean every single public employee will have to take a retirement haircut. Sorry, but we just can't keep the promises the politicians and the union leaders that funded their election campaigns colluded to provide.
