Sunday on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, , during a discussion of whether the government should bail out bankrupt Detroit, Washington Post columnist George Will got into it with Katrina vanden Heuvel, the far-left editor of The Nation magazine, and Steve Rattner, Obama’s former auto-bailout czar.
Rattner: ….. you have got a situation where 80 percent of the pain from this restructuring is being borne by the workers and the retirees if this plan goes through. You have a situation -- where I have read that whole plan, and I don't believe it can solve Detroit's problems. Detroit needs investment, and that's where the federal government and the state, particularly, can and should help.
Will: [Detroit] can't solve the problems, because their problems are cultural. You have a city, 139 square miles, you can graze cattle in vast portions of it, dangerous herds of feral dogs roam in there. 3 percent of fourth graders reading at the national math standards, 47 percent of Detroit residents are functionally illiterate, 79 percent of Detroit children are born to unmarried mothers. They don't have a fiscal problem, Steve, they have a cultural collapse.
vanden Heuvel: I find that really insulting to the people of Detroit. I think there is a serious discussion about the future of cities in a time of deindustrialization. But in many ways, Detroit has been a victim of market forces, and I think that what Steve said is so critical, that retirees and workers should not bear this. And this story should not be hijacked as one of about greedy public unions and fiscal responsibility.
Will: But Steve said in his op-ed [The New York Times, 7-20-13] was the people of Detroit are no more to blame than the victims of Hurricane Sandy, because apart from voting, he said. Well, what did they vote for? For 60 years, they voted for incompetents, malcontents and in some cases, criminals.
2 comments:
The people who live in Detroit have become the victims of their own stupidity and greed, and the excesses and criminality of 50 years of one-party rule and what was largely a reactionary black separatist city-state. They killed the goose with their own hands by virtue of pulling on the handle of the voting machine the same way year after year after year, putting up with mediocrity in their public officials and believing he way to prosperity was screwing somebody else. Now they are bankrupt, uneducated and unemployed and living in their own squalor. Tough titty.
79 % of children in Detroit are born to UNWED WOMEN !!!???!! OMG--Ya'll got some serious issues--good luck
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