If you want to see what the United States will look like after a second Obama term, all you need to do is to visit the City of Detroit, Michigan. Blocks of burned out and abandoned homes, business buildings, and government buildings litter the former Paris of the Mid West. It is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and the horseless water and sewer department maintains a horseshoer. It is called idiocy, incompetence and union favoritism.
Why would a horseshoer be on the payroll? Because it is a union government job and you don't get rid of these leeches without a heavy dose of leadership from the city fathers. This will not happen because they are elected by those who see nothing wrong with a department maintaining jobs which are irrelevant.
Most of the city should be leveled, turned back into farmland and let nature retake the blight. That would be the best solution, however, the powers to be will not allow this rational solution to occur. They want to maintain their power and somehow deer don't vote! (Even in Detroit.)
The US, like Detroit, is facing bankruptcy and Obama is merrily going about promising more programs for more people. Does he not get the facts or does he really want to destroy the country? (That's a rhetorical question.)
How many useless, make-work jobs are there in the US, like the farrier in Detroit? Probably millions! It is time to stop the craziness! Kick out Obama!
Conservative Tom
After A Nuke Hits Detroit, The Last Things Left Will Be Cockroaches And The Union Horseshoer
Of course, given the shape that Detroit is in, would it look all that different after a nuke? All right, all right, that’s hyperbole, but this story is not just ridiculous, it helps explain what’s gone wrong with Detroit, Michigan, and the American auto industry.
Despite having no horses, the water and sewerage department for the city of Detroit employs a horseshoer.Yet even with a department so bloated that it has a horseshoer and no horses, the local union president said it is “not possible” to eliminate positions.…The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) has a large debt, rising water prices and inefficient services — using almost twice the number of employees per gallon as other cities like Chicago.A recent independent report about the DWSD recommends that the city trim more than 80 percent of the department’s workforce. The consultant who wrote the report found 257 job descriptions, including a horseshoer. Capitol Confidential sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the department for the salary, benefits and job description of the horseshoer position.In response to the report, John Riehl, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 207, which represents many of the DWSD employees, told the Detroit Free Press that the department needs more workers.“They don’t have enough people as it is right now,” Riehl said. “They are just dreaming to think they can operate that plant with less.”
That’s right, folks. We have a city government that employs a horseshoer and a union that not only refuses to get rid of him, but also says it needs more workers. Meanwhile, Detroit is falling apart as people flee the city for greener pastures.
Now, true to its past, Detroit is not just fading away gracefully, but noisily sick and dying, expiring as spectacularly as it once lived. Fifty years ago it was the fifth-largest city in the United States, with 1.85 million people. Now it is eleventh, with just over 700,000 people. It is likely to fall further behind as it shrinks, and as more Americans head for the Sun Belt and the flourishing South West, away from this blighted, dingy Rust Belt.Each year at Halloween more of it is burned down in a mixture of wild destruction and insurance fraud. You can walk right through its majestic downtown in the middle of the morning and meet nobody at all. There is no danger of being mugged, as a mugger in this part of town might have to wait hours for a client.
Detroit is a city run top to bottom by liberals and the work force is dominated by big labor. They’ve done to that city what liberals are doing to California and what Barack Obama is trying to do to the whole country. The only difference is that the corrosive effects of liberalism have been at work much longer in Detroit. Give them enough time and liberals, along with the unions, would do the exact same thing to America that they’ve done to Detroit.
PS: If you want to actually SEE how far Detroit has fallen apart, you can watch this classic video from Steven Crowder.
This guy has an interesting take on the history of Detroit from an urban planning perspective…
ReplyDeletehttp://www.urbanophile.com/2012/02/21/the-reasons-behind-detroits-decline-by-pete-saunders/
Over the last 50 years, General Motors became one of the worst managed corporations in the U.S. When I started working in the automotive services industry (around 1986), Toyota was a small-time operator compared to GM, but they overtook GM the same way Apple overtook Microsoft. Among other things, they build cars that people wanted to buy while GM refused to adapt to the market or force concessions from unions (neither happened until 2008 collapse of the company).
As this guy points out, all the city planning in Detroit for nearly 100 years was dominated by GM and done to accommodate their needs. I think that he is probably right that this helps explain why Cleveland and Pittsburg have managed better than Detroit during the manufacturing decline.
--David
The one issue the author does not discuss, is the50 plus years of Democratic leadership in the city where giveaways are the rule of the day.
ReplyDeleteIt's there (see #7 "Local Government Organization"). His thesis is that Detroit has become an urban planning disaster because the local politicians for the last century have sold out to the auto industry.
ReplyDelete--David