When I read about Detroit's problems I get all starry-eyed. As Chairman Mao would say after every woeful report: "The situation is excellent!"
The state review team found in recent months that the city’s main courthouse had $280 million worth of uncollected fines and fees. No one could tell the team how many police officers were patrolling the streets, even though public safety accounted for a little more than half the budget. The city was borrowing from restricted funds and keeping unclaimed property that it was required to turn over to the state. In some city departments, records were “basically stuff written on index cards,” as one City Council member put it.
And
The problem in Detroit is too much government. This always bring financial chaos and terrible management. With Detroit people can quietly assure themselves it's the fact that Detroit is run by people of some African heritage, but that would ignore all the other white-run bankrupt cities and other larger cities that will go bankrupt in time.
Detroit grew because it was prime everything. It died for top-down social engineering. The American that built Detroit is gone. There is no America that can revive Detroit. But there is freedom, something to which all people in all times and places respond.
If the peninsula upon which Detroit sits were to be made into a autonomous region, with roughly the legal system of Hong Kong, then there would be a true renaissance. People willing to try would find their welfare checks inadequate, and those who irredeemably depended on welfare checks would find moving into USA proper economically advantageous.
Their Newspaper is the Detroit Free Press. How about the Detroit Free Autonomous Region?
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
The state review team found in recent months that the city’s main courthouse had $280 million worth of uncollected fines and fees. No one could tell the team how many police officers were patrolling the streets, even though public safety accounted for a little more than half the budget. The city was borrowing from restricted funds and keeping unclaimed property that it was required to turn over to the state. In some city departments, records were “basically stuff written on index cards,” as one City Council member put it.
And
Under Michigan law, the emergency manager would ultimately have the authority to remove local elected officials from most financial decision making, change labor contracts, close or privatize departments, and even recommend that Detroit enter bankruptcy proceedings, a possibility that experts say raises the prospect of the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history, at $14 billion worth of long-term obligations.
None of the decisions, experts here say, will be simple, and some wonder whether Detroit can be saved at all. Some 700,000 residents now live in this vast 139-square-mile city that once was home to nearly two million people. That number may fall to close to 600,000 by 2030 before the population begins to rise again, one regional planning group projects. By pushing costs into the future while its population is shrinking, Detroit has left the people least able to pay with the biggest share of its bills.
“Detroit is a microcosm of what’s going on in America, except America can still print money and borrow,” Mr. Boyle said.
The problem in Detroit is too much government. This always bring financial chaos and terrible management. With Detroit people can quietly assure themselves it's the fact that Detroit is run by people of some African heritage, but that would ignore all the other white-run bankrupt cities and other larger cities that will go bankrupt in time.
Detroit grew because it was prime everything. It died for top-down social engineering. The American that built Detroit is gone. There is no America that can revive Detroit. But there is freedom, something to which all people in all times and places respond.
If the peninsula upon which Detroit sits were to be made into a autonomous region, with roughly the legal system of Hong Kong, then there would be a true renaissance. People willing to try would find their welfare checks inadequate, and those who irredeemably depended on welfare checks would find moving into USA proper economically advantageous.
Their Newspaper is the Detroit Free Press. How about the Detroit Free Autonomous Region?
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
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