We’ve heard a lot about Detroit in the news recently. Seems they ran out of not only other people’s money, but the people who supplied that money. Most all of the residents with any decent prospects and/or snap split long ago, leaving a population unable and unwilling to lift itself up from the conditions in which it finds itself.
Our friends at Zero Hedge compiled a list of 25 factoids about Detroit that would make you weep if they were not so avoidable. A sampling:
3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.
4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today, there are less than 27,000.
9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.
25) Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk”.
Ummm…. No, thanks.
The article finishes with this sobering thought:
Detroit is only just the beginning. When the next major financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a wave of municipal bankruptcies unlike anything we have ever seen before.
And of course the biggest debt problem of all in this country is the U.S. government. We are going to pay a great price for piling up nearly 17 trillion dollars of debt and over 200 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.
We are well and thoroughly scrod.