Well, during the best of times, Detroit was a thriving center of the manufacturing universe metropolis. When it became cheaper for management to ship jobs out to China, Japan and the rest of the eastern countries, not so much. Fuck all the Americans that relied on those jobs, let's just make sure ownership maximizes profits.
Originally Posted by timpage
Now you're shifting blame to the car companies?.
There are a lot of cities from the northeast to mid-west that lost their manufacturing bases (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, etc.). They don't call it the Rust Belt for nothing. And yet those other big cities did not go bankrupt. They found ways to meet their debts. Or, to be more precise, they did not hang a public pensions millstone around their own necks.
Per this article, Detroit has the 9th highest taxes among all big cities in the US.
http://www.mlive.com/business/detroi...es_detroi.html
So getting revenue wasn't the problem. It was SPENDING.
The "blame the car companies" strategy is a bunch of horseshit. The car companies didn't disappear overnight. They slowly pulled out of Michigan over the course of decades. And they were never fully located in Detroit to being with. They were headquartered there, but much (most?) of the manufacturing was located outside of Detroit and could not be taxed by the city anyway.
Detroit had plenty of warning that it had to reduce the size of its government workforce. That was the one thing they refused to do. Now the debts are unbearable.