Scared Monkeys Discussion Forum

“Can’t solve the problems because the problems are cultural,” Will said. “You have a city, 139 square miles. You can graze cattle in vast portions of it. Dangerous herds of feral dogs roam in there. You have 3 percent of fourth graders reading at the national math standards. Forty-seven percent of Detroit residents are functionally illiterate. Seventy-nine percent of Detroit children are born to unmarried mothers. They don’t have a fiscal problem, Steve. They have a cultural collapse.”

The Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel objected to Will’s analysis, arguing Detroit was more a victim of deindustrialization.

“I find that really insulting to the people of Detroit. I think there’s a serious discussion about the future of cities in a time of deindustrialization...

One thing that has become evident about Detroit’s recent bankruptcy filing is that the city’s problems, though dire, are by no means unique and are in fact just a more extreme case of the situation that faces many other big U.S. cities and even a few state governments. The promises politicians made to voting blocs to gain and keep power have proven impossible to keep. In Detroit’s catastrophe is a lesson about the very nature of government, which we would be foolish to continue to ignore. The evidence is clear that the nation as a whole is on the same path as Detroit, and history suggests that there will soon be a wrenching reckoning on the national level.

In his current column, Charles Krauthammer aptly refers to economist Herb Stein’s famous dictum: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Krauthammer is right to apply Stein’s truism to Detroit. For several decades, under Democratic mayors and with Democrats controlling the municipal government, Detroit spent money it not only did not have but also could not possibly obtain. The money went to politicians, their cronies — the government employee unions that conspired to elect those politicians who would in turn make lavish pension promises to union workers — and pet projects intended to put some new paint on the crumbling city’s facade without doing anything at all to ameliorate the pervasive rot behind it. Meanwhile, the city’s schools deteriorated into ruins, police and fire services were cut back drastically, abandoned houses were left standing as lairs for squatters and criminals, and normal, working, taxpaying people left the city en masse. And the cycle continued.