It is unreal to hear liberals deflect responsibility for Bankrupting Detroit. Since the Chapter Nine filing, several liberal pundits have claimed conservatism is responsible for bringing down the city that was once called the “Arsenal of Democracy.”
“This is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub and it is not a pretty picture,” MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said shortly after the news broke.
Eager to add to the blind ignorance and terminal dishonesty, MSNBC’s Ari Melber decided to take it even further Wednesday when he claimed the city’s bankruptcy has put it on the fast track to becoming America’s “most libertarian city.”
“While it suffered for years under mismanagement and corruption under many Democratic officials, today Detroit is fast becoming the most libertarian city in the United States,” he said. “Even police and emergency services have literally become optional,” Melber added.
No, they have become to expensive, an inconvenient expense unworthy of sapping wealth from corrupt politicians.
He proclaimed that Congress should send emergency financial aid to the city to help it avoid disaster, almost as if it was a “moral imperative.” Actually, it wasn’t almost, he was the typical liberal moral imperative argument.
“There are a lot of things congress can do,” Melber said, “but if the largest local bankruptcy in our history isn’t the right time for spending on emergency aid and jobs, when is the right time?”
But the worst claim Melber made had to do with the people of Detroit themselves, who apparently in his mind have no responsibility to bear for the bankruptcy. He said “to no fault of their own” the people of Detroit are in this mess.
Does Detroit not hold elections? Did they run out of money before they ordered election ballots?
As recent as 2012, the city voted to “allocate $28.1 million from departments across the city to pay for pension costs that are still due from last year.” In June, the city declared a “moratorium on principal and interest payments on the city’s unsecured debt” — essentially, they stopped paying their bills in order to service the city’s public pensions.
Having too small a government has not been a problem the city of Detroit has had for a very long time. In fact, as I noted earlier, the unions have been putting Detroit on a path to oblivion far longer than anyone cares to talk about. On this issue, Harris-Perry is either not being honest or is exuding her usual amount of ignorance, but of the legacy burdens, Detroit’s city government will certainly come to bear.
