Jeez. Been a while since I saw that much partisan spin. Detroit has largely suffered from one thing; lack of industrial diversification. It rose and fell with the auto industry.
To paint it as a 'liberal' issue is to ignore some basic truths. During fat times it isn't an issue to provide a wide range of social programmes. Your income will support them. When the income falls, in this case due to a failing auto industry (back to the Energy Crisis which this pundit is too young to remember, and yet feels competent to comment upon), those programmes become too expensive to maintain.
However, the State and Federal governments permitted the auto sector to under-fund their retirement plans, by legislation. The same thing happened up here. Rather than scale back to reasonable levels the auto manufacturers were able to maintain their profitability, while increasing compensation and benefits, effectively robbing the future to do so.
Then we have that mythical and much debunked $74.00 an hour auto worker. That assumes the highest paid category, with all benefits and maximum pension levels, including the under-funding of the pension plans that was permitted by government. Then that number is compared to another mythical species; the foreign auto worker. Those workers are not dealing with an under-funded pension system and almost uniformly have Federally mandated universal health care. I wonder what formula this genius used to figure in THAT cost to the public? Oh, wait. He didn't.
And calling public education an 'entitlement programme'?! Moron, please! Public education is something that if you don't provide, you just create a class that is a drain on the public purse anyway. An educated populace increases your national profitability. The issues in Detroit are more about culture and societal collapse, than they are about the cost/benefits ratio of education. I wonder how many students aren't graduating from high school because they're in prison, for possession of weed?
Yes, people kept spending long after the money stopped coming in, but it's one hell of a lot more of a complex issue that jackasses like this child try to make it out to be.
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