It's been a long slow process, but years of spending money that it didn't have has finally caught up to Detroit. Unlike the federal government that can print all the money it wants, Detroit is up against the wall. Oh there will be the usual outcries from the usual people that it's all the fault of the public service unions. That's partially true, but there are much bigger causes for Detroit's woes.
The city looks like a war zone with deserted crumbling houses as far as they eye can see. If the population has been steadily declining, why didn't the government look hard at the types of services that it was providing and re-adjust? We'll never know, and no one will ever admit that one administration after another was oblivious, incompetent or both.
There is a bigger lesson here. As the Europeans have founs out the hard way, even if you can print money, that's often not the answer for reckless over spending. America's day is coming. As the baby boomers retire and out enormous pressure on Social Security and Medicare the $16 trillion in public debt that America is currently in the hole for is going to skyrocket. Given the slow economic growth and lack of anything that remotely resembles a functioning government in Washington, the outlook can't be very pretty.
If we don't put people in Washington who are more interested in public service than self service, nothing is going to change, and we will have only ourselves to blame.
