Buyouts reflect high price of Detroit's welfare mentality

Thomas Bray reports:

Detroit, remember, was going to be the "Model City" of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the shining example of what the "fairness" of the welfare state can produce.

Billions of dollars later, Detroit instead has become the model of everything that can go wrong when you hook people on the idea of something for nothing -- a once-middle-class city of nearly 2 million that is now a poverty-stricken city of less than 900,000.

Still the beat goes on: Detroit's public school teachers are engaging in massive sick-outs to protest minor cuts in pay and benefits, ignoring the fact that Detroit schools are losing students to the suburbs at the rate of 10,000 a year -- a decline in "market share" that makes even GM look good.

The GM and Delphi buyouts are themselves examples of welfare state mentality. They seem compassionate, but mainly if you are a worker already close to retirement. The staggering cost of the buyouts will take a big chunk out of the budget for development of future products.

And still intact is the creaky New Deal labor structure that makes a virtue of inefficiency on the factory floor.

The real question is: Who would have thought 25 years ago that Detroit could have ignored reality for so long?

Detriot is just the first.Who's going to second will be interesting.Will is be the declining city of Boston? Will it be the corrupt and declining city of Chicago.Or Philadephia,or New York city.Only time will tell, but do you really want to be a long term creditor of any of these union run cities with bloated pensions and overpaid government workers? Well do you?