Posted on 07/21/2013 9:43:13 PM PDT by Vince Ferrer
It is so sad to watch one of America's greatest cities die a horrible death. Once upon a time, the city of Detroit was a teeming metropolis of 1.8 million people and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. Now it is a rotting, decaying hellhole of about 700,000 people that the rest of the world makes jokes about. On Thursday, we learned that the decision had been made for the city of Detroit to formally file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. It was going to be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States by far, but on Friday it was stopped at least temporarily by an Ingham County judge. She ruled that Detroit's bankruptcy filing violates the Michigan Constitution because it would result in reduced pension payments for retired workers. She also stated that Detroit's bankruptcy filing was "also not honoring the (United States) president, who took (Detroit’s auto companies) out of bankruptcy", and she ordered that a copy of her judgment be sent to Barack Obama. How "honoring the president" has anything to do with the bankruptcy of Detroit is a bit of a mystery, but what that judge has done is ensured that there will be months of legal wrangling ahead over Detroit's money woes. It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays out. But one thing is for sure - the city of Detroit is flat broke. One of the greatest cities in the history of the world is just a shell of its former self. The following are 25 facts about the fall of Detroit that will leave you shaking your head...
1) At this point, the city of Detroit owes money to more than 100,000 creditors.
2) Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities. That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.
3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.
4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000.
5) Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.
6) There are lots of houses available for sale in Detroit right now for $500 or less.
7) At this point, there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.
8) About one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.
9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.
10) Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.
11) If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.
12) Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but over the past 60 years the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.
13) The city of Detroit is now very heavily dependent on the tax revenue it pulls in from the casinos in the city. Right now, Detroit is bringing in about 11 million dollars a month in tax revenue from the casinos.
14) There are 70 "Superfund" hazardous waste sites in Detroit.
15) 40 percent of the street lights do not work.
16) Only about a third of the ambulances are running.
17) Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.
18) Two-thirds of the parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down since 2008.
19) The size of the police force in Detroit has been cut by about 40 percent over the past decade.
20) When you call the police in Detroit, it takes them an average of 58 minutes to respond.
21) Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.
22) The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.
23) The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.
24) Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.
25) Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to "enter Detroit at your own risk".
It is easy to point fingers and mock Detroit, but the truth is that the rest of America is going down the exact same path that Detroit has gone down.
Detroit just got there first.
All over this country, there are hundreds of state and local governments that are also on the verge of financial ruin...
"Everyone will say, 'Oh well, it's Detroit. I thought it was already in bankruptcy,' " said Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone. "But Detroit is not unique. It's the same in Chicago and New York and San Diego and San Jose. It's a lot of major cities in this country. They may not be as extreme as Detroit, but a lot of them face the same problems."
A while back, Meredith Whitney was highly criticized for predicting that there would be a huge wave of municipal defaults in this country. When it didn't happen, the critics let her have it mercilessly.
But Meredith Whitney was not wrong.
She was just early.
Detroit is only just the beginning. When the next major financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a wave of municipal bankruptcies unlike anything we have ever seen before.
And of course the biggest debt problem of all in this country is the U.S. government. We are going to pay a great price for piling up nearly 17 trillion dollars of debt and over 200 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.
All over the nation, our economic infrastructure is being gutted, debt levels are exploding and poverty is spreading. We are consuming far more wealth than we are producing, and our share of global GDP has been declining dramatically.
We have been living way above our means for so long that we think it is "normal", but an extremely painful "adjustment" is coming and most Americans are not going to know how to handle it.
So don't laugh at Detroit. The economic pain that Detroit is experiencing will be coming to your area of the country soon enough.
This is actually a big reason for industries leaving cities and going off to suburbs or new cities. The EPA applies such strict standards to old industrial sites that force a prospective new user of the land to clean it up to pristine condition that it is easier to just buy some farmland on the edge of town and build a factory there.
This is entirely an effect of government policy. While the most serious health threatening pollution should be addressed, if it was a factory, and is zoned for a factory, and the city wants a factory to be there, there is no reason to clean it up to pristine condition before you slap another factory down on the land. There is no reason to build a new factory on the edge of town, taking up farmland, and allowing the old polluted factory land to rot and return to wilderness, when the old factory location was closer to railroads, ports and other infrastructure.
If government really wanted to help rust belt cities, it would relax these regulations.
Within 10 years they should rename it to North Haiti.
—
Demos are doing for the USA what they’ve done for Detriot for the last 50 years.
We have been screaming for decades.
We all saw this coming.
We tried to save ya.
You know what comes next?
They hand us the bill.
Duck you suckers.
You’re not supposed to say the real reason port au prince nord fell apart.
But it did make me wonder today: where are all the black investors?
Jay-z, a man worth 600 million, is steaming and screaming about Saint Trayvon and how the whit man be keeping the black man down.
There are no whites left in Detroit to speak of.
So he could be investing there and employing his brothers.
But yet he doesn’t. Just complains and demonstrates.
Funny that.
“If government really wanted to help rust belt cities, it would relax these regulations.”
Federal policies, starting with the Great Society programs in 1965, which told fathers they weren’t really needed in the family, are just the tip of the spear that led to Detroit’s demise.
Detroit was plagued for years by racial politics, led by Coleman Young, which drove “whitey” and his tax dollars out of town.
The final nail in Detroit’s coffin, which has been repeated in numerous medium and large cities throughout the nation, is the unholy symbiosis that exists between public sector unions and Democrat politicians. The former would ask for and get outlandish contracts; way out of line with private sector unions. In return, these unions would organize their money and manpower to get out the vote for these same politicians who were letting unions like AFSCME, SEIU, MEA, and police and firefighter unions fleece the system.
In fact, Detroit has residency laws on the books so that cops and firefighters have to live in the city to be employed there, assuring that these same people would cast their votes in Detroit for the same politicians that were participating in and contributing to the death spiral of a wholly corrupt quid pro quo system!
And the giveaways at the Federal level represent the same problem at a much larger scale!
Detroit is a microcosm of government and socialist policies working as intended.
There ya go.
He has no brothers
Detroit is ground zero for democrat graft and corruption, and should be held up as a shining example of liberal policies, the politicians that implement them, and the caliber of inhabitants that enthusiastically cheer it on at the voting booth. Put it on a pedestal with spot lights as exhibit “A”.
Obama’s socialist/democrat America.
9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.
My small southern home town had a population of around 5,000 in 1970 with about 40% black. Now the population is around 4,000 with 80% black.
A serious question: What is the solution?
If they could print their own money we’d have our own Zimbabwe.
The solution is to stand up and tell them to sit down, but we all know that is verboten. It would be mean even if you love them.
SO we must all suffer
Holder say we must all suffer, Obama says we should all suffer, even as they dictate from the house on the hill eating waygu beef and having ice cream and giving us the guilt trip.
I am a long suffering fellow but I call BS.
Shaking head? No.
Nodding head? Yes.
This is the inevitable product of all those leftist policies and politicians.
Gotta get rid of a lot of people.
And they want to let 11 million some mexicans to stay here free.
The elite is getting richer, while the middle class and lower class get poorer at this point.
Revolution, secession is the only answer.
Or West Palestine.
This is what happens when you hand over your automobile and electronics manufacturing base, first to the Japanese and years later, the rest of what was left of our economy, over to China.
This was in the making way before ZERO was old enough to do any damage.
We are a nation of dumbed-down half-wits who are engaged in selling “services” to each other.
Then the question is how do you “get rid of a lot of people”?
It’s obvious “getting rid” of people is why the liberal politicians are all for abortion. The people buy into the “choice” BS.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.