Run into the ground by Democrats and unions, the poster child for Hope & Change...
Posted on 03/25/2013 4:29:19 AM PDT by Kaslin
We are now hearing the usual voices of protest in Detroit in the wake of Michigan governor Rick Snyder appointing an outside expert to take over financial management of the near-bankrupt city.
Detroit is the largest city in American history to be seized in this fashion and turned over to an outside manager.
Reported deficit of the city is $327 million dollars and long-term liabilities are in the range of $14 billion.
But no matter to the unions, politicians, and bureaucrats who have been at the helm for years as the city has spiraled into the depths of the black hole in which it now finds itself. These interest groups, who have been the driving force behind this fiscal travesty, have one interest – to keep their respective beds feathered. Citizens and public welfare be damned.
So they cry foul when adult supervision is sent in to take on the formidable rescue task.
The man Governor Snyder has put in charge, Kevin Orr, is a high-powered Washington, DC black attorney who, according to USA Today, “has extensive experience in municipal finances, public infrastructure projects, public pension matters, and litigation.”
Al Sharpton’s man in Detroit, Rev. Charles Williams III, has called Orr an “Uncle Tom.”
The travesty now taking place in Detroit should be carefully watched by all Americans. This is not a one off exception to the rule, but is just the latest case study of a pathology dragging down the whole nation. And it’s a pathology for which low-income minority Americans are paying the dearest price.
Economist Dr. Walter Williams has noted that the common denominator of the nation’s ten poorest cities with populations over 250,000, of which Detroit is number one, is that they all have been controlled by liberal, Democratic mayors for decades, the majority of which have been black.
Detroit’s former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, son of former congresswoman and Congressional Black Caucus member Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick, is now in jail awaiting sentencing after being convicted on 24 counts for running a criminal enterprise out of the mayor’s office.
The point is that we need to discern a rule of thumb here: the more that human lives are governed by compulsion and entitlement rather than freedom, choice, and personal responsibility, the outcomes are uniformly undesirable.
Compulsion and entitlement, meaning liberal government and union power, means less service, less efficiency, more fraud, corruption, and waste, and insensitivity to changes in the marketplace.
If we are going to save our cities, we need to get back to what built them in the first place: freedom, enterprise, and entrepreneurship.
It took a hurricane and a flood to wake up and turn around the basket case that was New Orleans. Ray Nagin, New Orleans’ mayor during Katrina, who blamed everyone but himself for the debacle that occurred, was just indicted on 21 counts of corruption.
New Orleans is now undergoing a renaissance. The public school system was turned over to a charter operator and the number of failing schools has dropped and test scores are improving.
Low taxes and a new spirit of entrepreneurship, spurred by such imaginative initiatives as Idea Village, has kept unemployment in New Orleans at less than two-thirds the national average.
Let’s get going with ideas like urban enterprise zones, championed by the late Congressman Jack Kemp, and now by economist Art Laffer, and give preferential tax treatment to employers and employees in blighted urban areas.
Abolish the minimum wage in these areas and give kids a chance at entry-level jobs and learning critical job skills.
The possibilities are only limited by our courage and imagination. But only one theme will save our large, urban cities, and their poor minority citizens.
Get them out from under political and union control and restore freedom, competition, and entrepreneurship.
Run into the ground by Democrats and unions, the poster child for Hope & Change...
Wait till its Chicago, LA, St Louis, and hundreds of smaller cities. They’re debt loading at an astounding rate because they fully expect a bailout in the future.
“look for the union label”
take a one time tax of 10% on bank deposits in Detroit of more than $1000 that should raise a few thousand dollars, then match that with federal funds of a million to one.
There fixed it.
THE ONLY ANSWER FOR AMERICA:
2 Chronicles 7:14
14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.
And prove that that liberal policies are a huge failure? No way. The mantra has always been that liberal policies WOULD work if only there was enough of other people's money that could be applied. They'll stick with that even amid the ashes of cities like Detroit.
There are plenty of cities that are liberal Democrat pro-union strongholds but not total hell pits like Detroit. Austin, Seattle, San Fransisco, Pittsburgh and others are doing okay despite their Globalist/Marxist controllers. The top ten poorest cities must have some other common denominator that condemns them to the barest fringe of civilization, which they tenuously cling to thanks only to the truckloads of cash expropriated from people from outside those cities. Now what could it be that they have in common?
Hmmm. Atlanta. Washington DC. I hear that Charlotte is fast heading in that direction, too.
What could it be, what could it be.... hmmmmm.......
A demographic culture that sees elected office as an entitlement to graft.
Sure, there are corrupt politicians to be found in all ideologies and ethnicities,
but the combination of Democrat, liberal, and of the black urban culture has a very strong correlation to “using one’s office to enrich him/herself and cronies”.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the marked to market net worth total of all Deeetroit non corporate persons vs: the debt.
I can believe the citizens actually have little and very possibly negative net worth, not even including their portion of the city debt.
In purely economic terms, there is no need for an economic manager who can not possibly salvage a total economic wreck. The best he will be able to do is to reduce the damage imposed by the Deeetroit wreck on the state of Michigan.
In my case it was Revelation 18:4
Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“‘Come out of her, my people,’
so that you will not share in her sins,
so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
“In purely economic terms, there is no need for an economic manager who can not possibly salvage a total economic wreck.”
I think he’s just the designated executioner. Someone has to tell the unions and municipal employees that the trough is empty, and none of the local politicians wants to be the one to do it, so they brought in outside help with no local connections to be afraid of offending.
An inferior culture that pervades all of these cities. Races are not inferior, but cultures are, and it's time to stop walking on eggshells when it comes to this fact.
Yep........ you’re right, the hatchet man.
If these are good ideas - and I think abolishing the minimum wage and reducing taxes are good ideas - then they are good ideas for everyone. People need to stop thinking in a "targeted social engineering" way, and start thinking about the policies that are known to work best in all situations.
Wrong!
It's a pathology that low-income minority Americans have deliberately inflicted on themselves by voting for Hard Left Socialist candidates.
LOL
I don't know whether to laugh or cry!
Long overdue move, the state government stepping in to Detroit. Any way they can legally override the local government, they should.
The sadly canceled tv show “Boss” featured a plot line where there this is about to happen in Chicago, the Mayors solution is to open a casino. That hasn’t seemed to help D-town.
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