Fixing Detroit

Fox News this morning had a segment on Detroit’s bankruptcy filing. Fox ran its “ALERT!” streamer, but the only new news was the city actually filed. Stories about intent to file had been around for a while.

“Detroit has been spending on average $100 million more than it has taken in for each of the past five years. The city’s $11 billion in unsecured debt includes $6 billion in health and other retirement benefits and $3 billion in retiree pensions for its 20,000 city pensioners, who are slated to receive less than 10 percent of what they were promised. Between 2007 and 2011, an astounding 36 percent of residents lived below the poverty line. Last year, the FBI cited Detroit as having the highest violent crime rate for any major American city. In the first 12 years of the new century, Detroit lost more than 26 percent of its population.” – ‘Obama to Detroit: Drop Dead’

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/07/18/obama-to-detroit-drop-dead/


Here is a Progressive suggestion for Detroit’s insurmountable problem: Move everybody out.

It’s been done before, by a president who could fix everything. In the mid-1930s, the Agriculture Department’s Resettlement Administration moved thousands of farmers, and planned on moving more.

”The goal of the Resettlement Administration was the relocation of impoverished farm families and poor city families. … Like many other New Deal agencies, it was founded on the belief that a control of social conditions would produce better lives for American citizens. . . .”

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/1172-ken-burns-the-dust-bowl-blowing-sand-in-our-eyes

Resettlement czar Rexford G. Tugwell’s plans included moving 650,000 people from 100 million acres. – “Resettlement Administration,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resettlement_Administration

Congress balked, though, so Tugwell managed to move only a few thousand citizens from 9 million acres.

In one example in Arkansas, farmers were moved from their land on Mount Magazine to what the government considered more practicable land. The several thousand acres freed from human occupation became Mount Magazine State Park.

So, there is modern-day precedent for government moving people from an unsuitable location.