Detroit and Greece - the future of liberal policies in the United States and Europe...... no free lunch! "Rather than confront the problem, Krugman merely says what happened in Detroit is “one of those things” that just happen in a market economy that always creates victims. He also claims that the underfunded pension obligations that threaten the future of virtually ever state, city, and municipal government in the country are no big deal. The trillion-dollar shortfall may strike Krugman as a mere detail, but Detroit may be just the first of many other large cities that will find themselves in similar predicaments. As Nicole Gelinas writes today in the New York Post, even New York, which unlike Detroit faced and overcame not altogether dissimilar problems involving debt and urban blight in the last generation, may eventually be put in the same position unless something is done to deal with a bill for retiree medical benefits that dwarfs that of Detroit. Though, as she points out, New York has a smaller bond debt, Detroit’s sea of red ink was created by a similar confidence that they could keep borrowing money indefinitely. Krugman is right to say that there are always winners and losers in a free economy. Every city has its own story and Detroit’s is one that is particularly heavy on bad luck as well as mismanagement. But his Adam Smith-style warning that anyone could wind up being the buggy-whip manufacturer of the future ignores the factor that powerful unions and their political protectors play in exacerbating such problems. His claim that Detroit’s situation is the result of chance rather than primarily the result of “fiscal irresponsibility and/or greedy public employees” simply isn’t credible. A bailout of Detroit sets a precedent that can’t be repeated elsewhere because there just isn’t enough money to pay for every city that will eventually face similar problems. The wake up call that Detroit is sending Americans is one Krugman and other liberals would like us to ignore because they are confident that the federal leviathan, controlled by Democrats and fed by liberal assumptions, will always be able to squeeze enough cash out of productive citizens to pay for the left’s follies. They won’t face the truth about this because to do so would require Americans to do some hard thinking about a society where virtually everyone has their snouts in the collective trough of big government and thereby is a stakeholder in its survival in its current form. But what Greece showed Europe and what Detroit tells Americans is that sooner or later the well of public funds will run dry if obligations to liberal constituent groups continue to grow unchecked. And when that happens it is exactly the little guys who are hurting in Detroit who will be forced to suffer for Krugman’s ideology." commentarymagazine/2013/07/23/why-liberals-wont-face-facts-on-detroit-debt/
Posted on: Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:31:29 +0000
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