Detroit - There's just no money

[DeacMan]

I believe he is referencing that Detroit will have to sell that art - although I suspect you knew that when you wrote the above. I too would request a refund from WFU athletics - nothing leaves the checkbook until Bzd is gone.

 

[jhmd2000]

Typical post from you, focusing on something simple when reality is much more complex.

It isn't complex. It is simple. You can't keep kicking cans down the road forever. Had Detroit taken action years ago workers might have something instead of what they face today - which is virtually nothing.

It's pretty easy to pretend that problems you don't want to solve are "too complex."

If the third grade math that proves to you that you can't give away more in pension money than you take in is "too complex", then you need to go back to third grade. There is nothing complex about it. A professed absence of clarity is a clever disguise for a void of courage.

 

[jhmd2000]

Typical post from you, focusing on something simple when reality is much more complex.

I am not sure what Detroit did to "try too hard to retain manufacturing." I'm not even sure what that means.

What it did, as far as I can tell, was keep building infrastructure, hiring people, and otherwise spending money as if it would always be a city with a growing tax base. When the then-current tax base wasn't big enough, Detroit borrowed money to fund operations and promised big pensions in lieu of current salary (which is basically the same thing), promising to pay for it with future income from that theoretically always growing tax base. Amazingly, they continued to do this long, long after the point where it became crystal clear that Detroit and it's tax base were actually shrinking, and would continue to shrink for the foreseeable future.

It is critical and frightening to understand that hundreds of cities across the country have been and are continuing to do exactly the same thing. In Detroit, the tide went out and revealed that Detroit wasn't wearing a swimsuit. The same thing can happen to any city, it just happened more dramatically in Detroit. For most cities it is still working kind of OK as their tax base is continuing to grow to some extent, but another recession or a big crash in a critical industry could do the same thing to a lot of cities.

This is a good post. If indeed Detroit "tried to hard to retain", they must have been really poor communicators, b/c there are Japanese and German car companies making cars in the South (where the unions didn't chase away the labor). Much like college football, the Midwest's "best" efforts to retain manufacturing can't compete with the South. The truth, of course, is that they didn't compete at all. They plundered what they had, squandered it, and have now left a mess in their wake. American labor is alive and well in the American South. But it's probably "too complex" to figure out why...

eta: To be clear, I'm not trying to be a jerk, but if we actually want to solve the problem and prevent it from recurring in the future, we need to look at it with clear eyes. American labor works in places just fine where we let it.