Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Bytor Peltor
I guess it all depends on how you say it.
There is NO DOUBT Detroit did too much and spent more than their budget allowed. Detroit blew way past it's resources and now has nothing left to fall back on.
When you continue to borrow with no source of revenue to cover payments, bankruptcy is inevitable.
|
But that is the catch-22, it would be morally wrong not to honor existing contracts, bargains, and negotiations. If people who work for the government have paid into their pension plans and benefits packages under the contracted expectation that the government match them a certain figure, its point blank bad business practice for the government to then renege on the deal. If a corporation did that, people would sue that shit.
That being said, workers in Detroit have faithfully fulfilled their end of the deal, now there is a strong possibility that they will get nothing in return, perhaps even fired. Government needs to "cut down" people say, but that is bullshit. Proportionately in a lot of places, there aren't enough teachers, police, and maintenance workers. The government actually hasn't been growing FAST enough to catch up with population growth. Even in Detroit, while white-flight has reduced the size of the metropolitan population by 75%, the reality is the Conservative Michigan State legislature has further crippled the city by not infusing loans, investments, and other crucial funding which is a state-wide obligation. Detroit is part of the state of Michigan, if Detroit had fueled Michigan's growth for so many years, Michigan as a state should return the favor when Detroit is hard on its luck. Instead? Conservatives in the state legislature are going in for the kill.
It is a Neo-Con exaggeration to blame fiscal problems on government workers, the reality is that businesses and corporations don't pay their fair share through (a) unscrupulous accounting and tax write offs and (b) exploiting foreign labor for cheap wages to make increasing profits.
If the corporations and business were both paying their fair share in taxes, and hiring their fair share of American labor instead of outsourcing, so many cities and municipalities and even the Federal government might not find themselves so much in debt. This is not an ideological argument, this is an ontological economic reality, period. I am not a fan of the government, the government is evil, pure evil in fact. But where Conservatives want to cut funding is a worse evil, gutting public services including education and infrastructure, the few decent things we manage to coerce the government into supplying in the first place
