In the midst of the national paroxysm of idiocy that is the Trayvon Martin story, did anyone else happen to notice that the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy today? Yep, that’s right, the progressive model city for dozens of interventions schemed up as part of the War on Poverty over decades, nay, generations, has up and died.
Actually, technically, it has been dead for awhile. But with today’s filing, the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States can no longer be hidden from view. Early indications are that some creditors will be lucky to see ten cents on the dollar, while city pension obligations are looking like they will net out at less than that. Oops. Gee, wonder where all those billions of dollars went…
But wait, I hear you say. Didn’t the great and powerful Obama, just this last October, report that he had saved the city? I can clearly remember him saying “I refused to let Detroit go bankrupt.” What he meant was, “I refuse to let Detroit go bankrupt before my re-election.” What happens next will be a bailout of the city’s pension programs by the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) (translation: your tax dollars) for breathtakingly large sums of money that Ben Bernanke hasn’t even printed yet.
At some point, one likes to believe, even the cognitively impaired will finally pick their heads up and say, “hey, how did that get so profoundly fucked up, when the federal government has been pouring vast sums of money into an alphabet soup of welfare agencies in that city for generations, and there hasn’t been a conservative political leader within a hundred miles of the place since Kennedy was President?”
No, that is too much to hope for. America has finally descended to the bottom of the ladder of enlightened self-government, and, like hell, it is hot down here. So cast your gaze upon these last vistas of the city of Detroit, as it will never look better than this in your lifetime, and your hometown is next.