25 interesting facts about Detroit

[head of joaquin]

Why are you asking me? It's your claim. Substantiate it.

Oh, the irony.

 

[MaggieD]

Oh, the irony.

Really? I thought it was flip, but a fair statement.

 

[pdog]

Many of the citizens of Detroit are hooked on entitlements and have also bought the xenophobia sold to them by their politicians that states that their problems are all someone else's fault, pitting them against outsiders and fostering a victim mentality that makes it so much more difficult to become successful. Would you say these are prominently Republican or Democrat inner city tactics?

Let me start by saying I appreciate that you comment at least with first hand knowledge:

Many of the citizens of Detroit are hooked on entitlements

Right or wrong, in the context of bankruptcy is this relevant? These are state and federal dollars coming INTO the city.

have also bought the xenophobia sold to them by their politicians that states that their problems are all someone else's fault, pitting them against outsiders and fostering a victim mentality that makes it so much more difficult to become successful. Would you say these are prominently Republican or Democrat inner city tactics?

I think i've already covered Detroit stupidity, but fear-mongering is hardly a trait reserved to one political party.

 

[fmw]

Well, this is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Citron

I just goes to show that incompetence has no party affiliation.

 

[American]

9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

There is that 47% number again.

They all appear to vote Democrat. :lol:

 

[WhyNotWhyNot]

The death of the automotive industry killed Detroit not the casinos.

Actually Michigan, Detroit, and other large southern Michigan municipailties killed the automobile industry beginning in the 1960's. Tax laws, business laws, labor laws, costly labor, and inflexible labor made the Michigan economy less and less competitive as their primary industry became international. My father in law owned Clark dealerships in Flint and Saginaw in the 1970's. Clark was the premier fork truck company in the world. It's headquarters were in Michigan and it was supported by many component manufacturers and assembly plants. Clark was thousands of jobs in Michigan. Imported fork trucks started eroding Clark sales. Then the importing companies established manufacturing plants in the Southeast US where states and municipalities were offering financial incentives, labor cost less, and labor was much more flexible. Clark moved its headquarters and assembly plant to Tenessee in an attempt to remain competitive. This story was repeated over and over in the 1970's and 1980's and Michigan and its large municipalities remained stuck watching the exodus. Michigan was once the most inventive and prosperous state in the US. It had an education system second to none. The Michigan government needs to study the small book "Who Moved My Cheese?"

 

[JC Callender]

There are state and federal tax dollars coming into the city, but none of these people on entitlements are paying any significant taxes to the city. These are all people using the city resources.

I agree, Republicans are corrupt as well. But I would say the Democrats, at least the inner city ones, own the victim mentality and entitlement culture.

Appreciate your compliment, btw.

Let me start by saying I appreciate that you comment at least with first hand knowledge:



Right or wrong, in the context of bankruptcy is this relevant? These are state and federal dollars coming INTO the city.



I think i've already covered Detroit stupidity, but fear-mongering is hardly a trait reserved to one political party.

 

[CycloneWanderer]

I just goes to show that incompetence has no party affiliation.

Really? It appears to me that the claim that Republicans were solely responsible for the bankruptcy of Orange County is factually incorrect. If anything, one individual (who happened to be democrat) was primarily repsonsible. To place blame entirely on one party when one individual is most responsible would be foolish, IMO.

 

[fmw]

Really? It appears to me that the claim that Republicans were solely responsible for the bankruptcy of Orange County is factually incorrect. If anything, one individual (who happened to be democrat) was primarily repsonsible. To place blame entirely on one party when one individual is most responsible would be foolish, IMO.

You took that way, way too seriously. I'm not a partisan. My comment simply meant that both sides of the aisle have plenty of incompetence.

 

[blaxshep]

Actually Michigan, Detroit, and other large southern Michigan municipailties killed the automobile industry beginning in the 1960's. Tax laws, business laws, labor laws, costly labor, and inflexible labor made the Michigan economy less and less competitive as their primary industry became international. My father in law owned Clark dealerships in Flint and Saginaw in the 1970's. Clark was the premier fork truck company in the world. It's headquarters were in Michigan and it was supported by many component manufacturers and assembly plants. Clark was thousands of jobs in Michigan. Imported fork trucks started eroding Clark sales. Then the importing companies established manufacturing plants in the Southeast US where states and municipalities were offering financial incentives, labor cost less, and labor was much more flexible. Clark moved its headquarters and assembly plant to Tenessee in an attempt to remain competitive. This story was repeated over and over in the 1970's and 1980's and Michigan and its large municipalities remained stuck watching the exodus. Michigan was once the most inventive and prosperous state in the US. It had an education system second to none. The Michigan government needs to study the small book "Who Moved My Cheese?"

That does make sense, good post.

 

[Mizmo]

Liberalism is the cause of the downfall of Detroit and many other large cities. Think about it!

 

[KLATTU]

Liberalism is the cause of the downfall of Detroit and many other large cities. Think about it!

Agreed. Liberalism and corrupt Democrats. ( Not always the same thing)

Nice takedown of liberal gadfly Krugman here.
Note to Paul Krugman: It Took More Than Markets to Ruin Detroit | Via Meadia
Krugman is right that Detroit is essentially Ground Zero of the disruptive changes wrought by an economy in transition. But as this story and others like it show, it’s difficult not to conclude that the city is also the victim of rampant fraud and stupidity on the part of an all-Democratic political machine. Officials decided time and again not to fund the promises they made to city pensioners, and feds and regulators just as often declined to do anything about it. If something this egregious and destructive were happening in the private sector, Mr. Krugman would (rightly, in our view) be all over it, demanding that people go to jail and regulations be tightened. He would want to investigate the ties of influence that allowed serious financial wrongdoing to go on for years without serious oversight. He’d name names and pin shame on the wrongdoers and their political allies.

Detroit didn’t just wither in the face of changing economic conditions. It failed to adapt. Motor City is littered with dumb “recovery” ideas like the grandiose and badly named “Renaissance Center” in the dead heart of downtown. Race baiting politics by corrupt hacks who cynically invoked racial stereotypes and stoked hatred to build popular support for criminal rule (a milder, home-grown style of the politics of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe) made a bad situation much worse. The soft bigotry of low expectations meant that neither federal nor state prosecutors intervened until very late as the thieves looted the ruins. The civil rights establishment kept its eyes devoutly averted and its lips firmly sealed as a generation of fraudsters ruined the city, wrecked the pension system, turned city administration into a swamp of ineffective and corrupt failure, and denied a generation of schoolchildren any serious educational opportunity.

 

[pdog]

There are state and federal tax dollars coming into the city, but none of these people on entitlements are paying any significant taxes to the city. These are all people using the city resources.

Yeah, because detroit is awesome at collecting taxes .
Detroit's fiscal crisis would end if people just paid their taxes | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

I agree, Republicans are corrupt as well. But I would say the Democrats, at least the inner city ones, own the victim mentality and entitlement culture.

I'll conceed that if you're a crook and you want to maximize the chance that somebody leaves your city unlocked so you can rob it blind, than yes you call yourself whatever might get you elected and in this case it is democrat. But what does that mean at the municipality level:
Beyond the state, there is very little control beyond soup kitchens and salvation armies as far as entitlements go (i'll beat you to it to say that they're not smart enough to know that though ). In then end I think it has more to do to fitting the mold than it does with any bit of substance a candidate has to offer. Who would win - a white democrat or a black republican? I'm not trying to make this about race but in a city with a 10:1 demographic, it's easy to guess who would be seen as the outsider. How did Kwame win a second term even after the scandals starting to surface? - he painted Hendrix as an uncle tom - another outsider. Really curious to see if duggan has a snowballs chance in hell.

Appreciate your compliment, btw.

Nobody wants to have a debate with the peanut gallery .

 

[Neomalthusian]

Agreed. Liberalism and corrupt Democrats. ( Not always the same thing)

Nice takedown of liberal gadfly Krugman here.
Note to Paul Krugman: It Took More Than Markets to Ruin Detroit | Via Meadia
Krugman is right that Detroit is essentially Ground Zero of the disruptive changes wrought by an economy in transition. But as this story and others like it show, it’s difficult not to conclude that the city is also the victim of rampant fraud and stupidity on the part of an all-Democratic political machine. Officials decided time and again not to fund the promises they made to city pensioners, and feds and regulators just as often declined to do anything about it. If something this egregious and destructive were happening in the private sector, Mr. Krugman would (rightly, in our view) be all over it, demanding that people go to jail and regulations be tightened. He would want to investigate the ties of influence that allowed serious financial wrongdoing to go on for years without serious oversight. He’d name names and pin shame on the wrongdoers and their political allies.

Exacto-****ing-lutely. And why doesn't he admit this? Because Krugman uses economic commentary to strategically defend his pre-loaded partisan political agenda.

Princeton and academia in general should give him the boot. He'll make more working for MSNBC and NYT anyway. He already does.

 

[upsideguy]

Liberalism is the cause of the downfall of Detroit and many other large cities. Think about it!

Thank you for your well thought out, well articulated and well supported post. You could have done something trite and meaningless by blurting out something silly like ".....Liberalism is the cause of the downfall of Detroit and many other large cities..." which would have added nothing to the discussion, but you went the extra mile to do the research and back up your statement with facts, timely news articles and cleaver insights of some of today's top political commentators.

 

[JC Callender]

I think a white Democrat would win. I think they would elect Geoffrey Fieger if he ran.

Do you live in Detroit? I'm in Northville.

Yeah, because detroit is awesome at collecting taxes .
Detroit's fiscal crisis would end if people just paid their taxes | Detroit Free Press | freep.com


I'll conceed that if you're a crook and you want to maximize the chance that somebody leaves your city unlocked so you can rob it blind, than yes you call yourself whatever might get you elected and in this case it is democrat. But what does that mean at the municipality level:
Beyond the state, there is very little control beyond soup kitchens and salvation armies as far as entitlements go (i'll beat you to it to say that they're not smart enough to know that though ). In then end I think it has more to do to fitting the mold than it does with any bit of substance a candidate has to offer. Who would win - a white democrat or a black republican? I'm not trying to make this about race but in a city with a 10:1 demographic, it's easy to guess who would be seen as the outsider. How did Kwame win a second term even after the scandals starting to surface? - he painted Hendrix as an uncle tom - another outsider. Really curious to see if duggan has a snowballs chance in hell.


Nobody wants to have a debate with the peanut gallery .

 

[minnie616]

Michigan's recession lasted 10 long years.
Michigan did not recover from the 2000 recession until 2010.

Michigan economy grew 2.9% last year

U.S. data shows state came out of recession in 2010

Brian J. O'Connor/ Detroit News Finance Editor
The recession in Michigan officially ended last year, according to new government data released Tuesday. In fact, the Michigan economy grew at a rate of 2.9 percent during 2010 — the state's best economic growth since 2002.

Even better, the state's unofficial decade-long "one-state recession" is done, too.

"It's over. There's no question about that," said economist Don Grimes of the University of Michigan's Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy. "We fixed some of our structural problems, and we'll look very similar to the nation as we go forward."

Despite the news that things are getting better,
Michigan ends the recession as a smaller, poorer state that has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs during the Great Recession,
on top of another half-million jobs lost since 2000.

An official recession is when gross domestic product — GDP for short, which is the total of all goods and services produced — falls for two consecutive quarters. It's easier to pinpoint the national recession, because U.S. GDP is computed every quarter, while state GDP is calculated just for each year.

So the U.S. recession officially spanned the 18 months from December 2007 to June 2009,
while the state's downturn lasted through 2008 and 2009, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

But unofficially, Michigan has been in recession since the dawn of the millennium.

When adjusted for inflation, Michigan's gross domestic product fell in 2000-01 and 2004-07, according to the state's Senate Fiscal Agency. Michigan made modest gains in 2002 and 2003 even as employment continued to fall. According to how the federal agency calculates things, state economic output appeared to grow in that time, but in reality, the state never really pulled out of the recession that the rest of the country exited in 2002.

Worse, Michigan continued to bleed jobs every year since 2000, dropping from a total of employed nonfarm workers of 4.7 million at the end of that year to 3.9million at the end of 2010.

read more:

US data claims Michigan came out of recession in 2010 | mibihar.com

 

[Dr. Chuckles]

It always amazed me that a place like Detroit could even exist in america. I've been in some really poor parts of the world, but there is something about Detroit that is Soul-sucking bleak. I think it has to do with all the abandoned buildings and the general emptiness in parts of the city

Maybe Detroit can start churning out B-grade trash cinema like the Italians?

 

[pdog]

I think a white Democrat would win. I think they would elect Geoffrey Fieger if he ran.

We'll agree to disagree on that one I think you're crazy . I think Kwame could beat him from federal prison if he ran.

Do you live in Detroit?

No, just work there.

 

[minnie616]

IN THE NEWS:

Mark Wahlberg is pulling for Detroit

DETROIT -
Actor Mark Wahlberg, appearing on national television to promote his new movie, also said people should see what's happening in Detroit.

"I'm shooting 'Transformers' right now in Detroit," Wahlberg said on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. "Detroit is not what people think. It's amazing.
For example, my wife was terrified about coming to Detroit."

Wahlberg said his wife figured there would be nothing to do and nothing worth seeing, especially since the city had recently filed for bankruptcy.
"I said no actually, it's really nice and they came and they had a blast," Wahlberg said.

He called Detroit, "a great, great city" and said he hopes people will continue to bring new business there and to continue helping the economy.

"I love the city and hopefully they will turn it around ," Wahlberg said.

read more:

Mark Wahlberg is pulling for Detroit | News - Home