We Have to Step In and Save Detroit

New York Times ^ | July 19, 2013 | STEVEN RATTNER

[reaganaut1]

...

But while Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has capably overseen Detroit’s march to Chapter 9, neither the state nor the federal government has evinced any inclination to provide meaningful financial assistance.

That’s a mistake. No one likes bailouts or the prospect of rewarding Detroit’s historic fiscal mismanagement. But apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs, and eventually Congress decided to help them.

America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate as it is about personal responsibility. Government does this in so many ways; why shouldn’t it help Detroit rebuild itself?

Many call for scaling back the city to fit realistic population projections. While logical, the potential for downsizing Detroit is limited because the city’s population didn’t flee from just one neighborhood; the departures were scattered, requiring Detroit to deliver services across a geographic area the size of Philadelphia, with less than half the population. Further cuts will surely come, but in some key areas, like public safety and blight removal, Detroit needs to spend more, not less.

That necessitates large-scale reductions in its liabilities, which total as much as $18 billion. By comparison, the country’s second largest municipal bankruptcy — that of Jefferson County, Ala., which is slightly smaller than Detroit in population — involves $4 billion of liabilities.

Detroit faces greater challenges than the automakers because the structure of its obligations is quite different from those of General Motors and Chrysler.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

This is when we should have a discussion about Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest.

Darwinism is irrelevant in this context.

It is nature's way of strengthening the population by rewarding the most successful.

Which is why we are knee-deep in gays, abortions, alcoholism, crime, obama, communists, democrats, muslim, and a million other things that shouldn't exist if Darwinism were true.

By rewarding the corruption and recklessness of cities like Detroit at he expense of prudent cities, you take away the incentive for cities to live within their means.

These are not random hereditary variations are they? Does Detroit pass them down to its offspring? I thought people in this thread generally agreed that Detroit's problems are not random unplanned acts of nature. Also, I can't see how they are hereditary, since cities do not have genes or chromosomes. Nor do they mate and have descendants.

[mrsmel]

To add insult to injury, they want to reward the criminals with the tax money they steal from the law-abiding producers. But that has ever been the MO of the race industry and one or their main articles of faith, wealth redistribution from whites to blacks.

[mrsmel]

What would be funny if it wasn't so evil in its intent, is the way blacks continually cry that whites are their “oppressors”, yet they blame these same “oppressors” for white flight (fleeing an area where crime, failing schools, onerous business regulations, and high taxes on the few producers-mostly white-have made the area utterly unlivable for middle class and working class whites). Mayor Coleman Young even explicitly said that whites weren't welcome in Detroit, much as Nagin said about New Orleans. The only possible meaning to gain from this is that blacks want whites to have nothing, but fork over anything they do manage to produce, to blacks. That's just slavery. They're still bitching about slavery which ended after rivers of white blood was spilled to end it, but trying to put whites in this present day in bureaucratic chains.