Detroit Denial: A Democratic Disease (but not entirely!)

Remember when we were told that the average retired city worker in Detroit was receiving a pension of no more than $19,000 a year? Well, it turns out that was only sort of accurate. In fact, when there was extra money in the pension system, it was paid out in the form of “bonuses to retirees, supplements to workers not yet retired and cash to the families of workers who died before becoming eligible to collect a pension,” according to Mary Williams Walsh, writing in the NY Times’ “Dealbook.” Over the past several decades, these off-the-book payments amounted around $2 billion, according to Walsh.

When that $19,000 figure was first bandied about, I took it with a mighty draught of salt, and it turns out that I was right. In fact, I would be enormously surprised if this is the last “surprise” that the Detroit pension system has for us. It is one of the hallmarks of modern urban corruption that no one really knows what is going on. Knowledge is power, but ignorance is safety, and while the outside experts kvetch and moan, the bureaucratic moles simply move the pea under a new thimble.

A few months ago, when the city first declared bankruptcy, Paul Krugman opined that “Detroit does seem to have had especially bad governance, but for the most part the city was just an innocent victim of market forces.” Naturally, conservatives found precisely the opposite moral: that Detroit was simply the first shoe to drop, the first of many bankruptcies fueled by Democratic profligacy, the necessary result of the marriage of high-flying liberalism and unscrupulous public unions.

I think the conservatives are closer to the mark than Paul, but both are trying to ignore the Great American Elephant, aka “race.” Dispassionate sociological analysis may someday discover why the sixties race riots only maimed cities like Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but gave Detroit an ultimately mortal wound.* In all major American cities, black crime rose enormously, but somehow Detroit always led the rest. And only in Detroit did arson become an annual ritual and inner city sport.

It’s hard to say if Coleman Young was “worse” than Washington, DC’s Marion Berry, but DC had the ever-giving cornucopia of the federal government, and Detroit did not. And while none of Berry’s successors came close to matching his record of corruption, Young’s successors did. The level of public services in Detroit became atrocious. The city was already on life support when the Great Contraction hit. GM and (maybe) Chrysler were worth saving, but Detroit was not. Chrysler makes lousy cars, but the City of Detroit makes nothing.