For Detroit, A Crisis Born of Bad Decisions and Crossed Fingers - The New York Times
Excerpt:
"This city was already sinking under hundreds of millions of dollars in
bills that it could not pay when a municipal auditor brought in a
veteran financial consultant to dig through the books. A seasoned
turnaround man and former actuary with Ford Motor Co., he was stunned by
what he found: an additional $7.2 billion in retiree health costs that
had never been reported, or even tallied up."
If you havn't had a chance to Read Patrick Buchanan's great book, The Great Betrayal - How American Sovereignty and Social Justice are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy, why don't you pick up a copy today at your local library? And if you live in Detroit, this book is a must read! Here is a short excerpt:
"No
site better captures yesterday's America than Detroit, forge and
furnace of America's democracy. Detroit is the burned out case of
American cities. The Empire of the Sun has its revenge. Japanese imports
helped kill the city that built the weapons that destroyed the empire.
Now grandsons of the soldiers of the imperial army work at high paying
manufacturing jobs once held by the fathers of ten-dollar-an-hour retail
clerks in Macomb County.
"But why blame the Japanese?
We did it to ourselves. We Americans created a post war trading regime,
in which, over 25 years, Japan bought 400,000 American cars while
selling us 40 million Japanese cars, a ratio of 100:1. One president
after another sat still while a third of America'a greatest industry was
shipped off to Japan...
"Americans no longer make
their own cameras, shoes, radios, TVs, toys. A fifth of our steal, a
third of our autos, half our machine tools, and two-thirds of our
textiles are made abroad...
"The decline and fall of
Middle America was neither preordained nor inevitable. It
was engineered in Washington D.C. Wages have fallen and the standard of
living of American families has stagnated because of a basic law: the
law of supply and demand. The price of labor has been dropping because
the supply of labor has exploded...
"Having declared
free trade and open borders to be American policy, why are
we surprised that corporate executives padlocked their plants in the
Rust Belt and moved over seas? Why keep your plants here when you can
manufacture at a fraction of the cost abroad, ship your goods back, and
pocket the windfall profits that come from firing $20 an hour Americans
and hiring fifty-cent-an-hour Asians? A pair of Nikes that sells for
$150 in the United States costs $5 in wages to make in Indonesia. Any
wonder that Nike president Philip Knight is the fifth richest man in
America, with $5.2 billion, while his Indonesian workers make 31 cents
an hour?"
Other recommeded reading (My posts/reposts):
When Your Outgo Exceeds Your Income, Your Upkeep Will Be Your Downfall
