I was rather curious that no one had brought up the recently-filed Detroit bankruptcy, seeing as it’s a pretty major news story. I have my own take on it but were prefer not to blather endlessly. I’m interested in Doper’s views of the matter, however.
I suspect it’s going to get tied up in court for years or decades until or unless the city just collapses.
In the past, Detroit was known for middle class prosperity and technological progress. In recent years, it’s instead become known for:
High taxes. Very high taxes. The highest among major American cities.
Incompetence and corruption. The current mayor is a basketball player with no qualifications to run anything. His predecessor is in jail.
Big government. As one person mentioned in the other thread, the number of city government employees is huge relative to the population. Over the past few decades, Detroit has done an excellent job of getting rid of taxpayers who pay into the system. The population dropped by two thirds, but the number of city employees taking money out of the system only dropped a little. The problem, to put it bluntly, is that it’s virtually impossible to fire a government employee. They sit around collection their generous salaries and generous pensions, even when there’s no reason for having them.
If a city’s tax base is growing, you may be able to afford those big salaries and pensions for the government employees. But if the amount of tax money going in drops while the amount of tax money going out remains high, eventually your city will look like Detroit. Conservatives and libertarians have been warning about this for years, and lately a few liberals have started becoming aware of how government employees are pushing cities and states towards bankruptcy. Today’s news is fair warning of what will happen in many places if we can’t shrink government.
If they were smart, they’d turn it into some kind of dystopian nightmare. Withdraw services to a certain border that is small enough to be defensible and abandon all who are outside The Wall. Sell tickets to tourists, promise nothing
Maybe it’s not a bigger story because it’s an old story. It’s foolish to expect success when you allow people to continue to enjoy the benefits of an urban center while living in tax havens like Grosse Pointe while leaving those who cannot afford to move responsible for maintaining the aging infrastructure and deal with the mess of industrialization. So Detroit failed. Big surprise. The astonishing thing would be if the surrounding parasites suddenly stood up to take responsibility for their handiwork.
The thing to do is to expand the borders of Detroit to give it a decent tax base. Then tax rates could be more reasonable and the hopelessness and one party rule that lead to the high level of corruption could be eliminated. Instead I expect the city to be taken over by the right wing zealots who run the state government. They will implement the same policies with the same fervor that worked so well in Baghdad.
The US auto industry propped up Detroit for 90 years. Then it became a joke (though now it’s not). The city was bound to follow suit.
I’ve heard this particular view more than once. However, there are some issue. First off, the “suburbs” of Detroit frequently include communities quite some distance from it, with their own individual cores and identities. More to the point, what services are they supposedly consuming? I don’t see a great many people deliberately going to downtown Detroit to work or play; cultural offerings are equal or better outside of it, while city structures crumble.
If you view is that people who may or may not have ever lived within Detroit’s boundaries, and are only vaguely associated with the region, must prop up its failing and notoriously corrupt government, then… well, I’m not certain there’s much to say.
In economic terms the cities surrounding Detroit are tied to it. There might still be a Grosse Pointe without the big city but hardly anyone would live there. The great concentration of wealth that it represents was earned in the city. Yet the people holding it have washed their hands of the debris, human and environmental, of that process. The profits were theirs but the problems belong to someone else. Parasites.
Err… how does that work, exactly? Because businesses at one point were located in Detroit, it is now King of Western Michigan and all shall bow before it? Detroit’s huge problem isn’t just people leaving, it’s that business owners, taxpayers, and pretty much anybody who can leave chooses to leave. There’s still some major businesses there, but just how many people from the suburbs are supposedly dependent on the city’s businesses?
More to the point, you still haven’t explained why, given the complete collapse of Detroit’s government, we should supposedly subsidize it indefinitely by grabbing tax money from working towns and cities? The actual city of Detroit in and of itself has become less and less significant over time; it’s now only a fraction of the region’s economic power.
The employers left. Many of the skilled employees left. Many of the non-skilled employees left. The clothing stores, funriture stores, hardware stores closed their doors for lack of business. More employees left. Tax revenue dropped. Government cost and pensions remained.
Detroit spent more money than it took in. Detroit is spending more money than it takes in.
Detroit is now bankrupt. Many people will argue the bankruptcy filing in court but the city doesn’t really have the money to fight such a case. They’re bankrupt.
Detroit would be better off spending it’s tax money creating jobs and bringing employers to Detroit. No new employers = no new jobs.
If anyone wants to send a donation to the Detroit government, I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to accept it.
Hey, if Detroit needs money so bad, why don’t they just raise taxes? And raise the costs for driver’s licenses, parking tickets, sales tax, business permits and the like?
Are you sure about that?
Their website says they pay cops $30 - 50K per year, after 5 years.
The one year anniversary salary for my city is $60 - 70K. $70 - 80K after two years. From living here I know, with overtime, they can make $100K plus.
Payscale.com claims the city of Detroit typically pays its employees -14% below market rates. Average City of Detroit Salary in 2025 | PayScale
Seems like “Detroit pays city workers too much” might be more a talking point than an actual fact.
I know that this is what Democrats are trained to say whenever the topic of Detroit’s bankruptcy, and the desperate financial situation of other major cities, is brought up. Where’s the evidence that it’s true?
Detroit’s recent mayors have been corrupt or incompetent or both. Do you dispute it? Detroit gave lavish pay and benefits to its unionized government employees without having any long-term plan to pay for it. Do you dispute it? High taxes and regulations made Detroit unattractive to employers, so they moved out and no new ones moved in. Do you dispute it? And if you don’t dispute it, then what would be accomplished by forcing the suburban dwellers to give more money to a corrupt government?
Pay and benefits for government employees have soared upwards all around the country in the past generation or so. It would not surprise me to learn that Detroit’s city employees got less than city employees in places like NYC or California. After all, Detroit has been the poorest city in the country for awhile. The point is that Detroit gave, in total, too much money to its employees, and is now bankrupt as a result.
*2. Incompetence and corruption. The current mayor is a basketball player with no qualifications to run anything. His predecessor is in jail.
*
Nope.
If it “wouldn’t surprise you” that Detroit’s employees are underpaid, why did you say, earlier, that their salaries are “generous”?
The words you quoted seem pretty unambiguous to me. Concentrations of wealth in suburban Detroit are a product of the industrial core. That process also created a lot of problems that remain behind. Problems that cost money to address. Money that the city cannot raise from those pockets of wealth outside the city. I am characterizing that relationship as parasitic.
( BTW- Detroit is in Southeastern Michigan.)
Why wouldn’t anyone who could leave do so? My family did and we feel no desire to return. Detroit is a hellhole. The problem isn’t that people could and did leave the problem is that they could “leave” and yet remain nearby and continue to profit while externalizing the costs.
Do you have any evidence for this Democratic training that you reference? Just kidding! For myself (who looks on the Democratic Party with contempt leavened only by the knowledge that they aren’t as bad as the alternative) I don’t believe it is a coincidence that high income/low tax cities such as the Grosse Pointes or Bloomfield Hills exist so close to Detroit. It seems obvious to me that suburbs are related economically to the “urbs”.
I have seen nothing to disparage Dave Bing. Certainly corruption is endemic in Detroit politics.
I have seen nothing to say that unionized city employees are overpaid. Certainly there can be no sustainable plan to continue to run the city as it has been run.
I have seen nothing to say that regulations in the city are onerous. Certainly the higher taxes are deterrent enough.
I don’t propose that suburbanites contribute money to a corrupt government. I propose that the suburbanites join Detroit and form a new government. A government with the tax base to match the scale of the issues facing the region. A government where no group of fixers have permanent control so that corruption can be easily swept under the rug. Basically, ending the hopelessness and one party rule is the route to draining the swamp. Not that that is going to happen, mind.
The whack-a-doodles are taking the opportunity to misconstrue this as a broken Obama promise not to let Detroit go bankrupt.
Back on a planet with a blue sky, population decline plus hard times in the auto industry. Is it that hard to figure out? Yes, there was a corrupt mayor in Kwame, the city council is a bunch of ninnies, but their share of the cause is probably minor.
You’d think they’d be happy that Obama was doing exactly what Romney said he should do.
To be fair to both, neither was referring to the city government, they were talking GM and Chrysler.