Detroit Victim of Its Own Success

Detroit has become everyone’s favorite whipping boy these days, but in The New Republic, Jon Cohn notes, “for all of Detroit's mistakes, it is also a victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for blue-collar workers." “In a more enlightened society, after all,” Cohn writes, “government would have made those promises and extended them to all workers, thereby spreading the burden of financing them to all taxpayers. That's how it's done in Europe and in Japan--which, not coincidentally, is the home of Detroit's most successful competitors. But the U.S. government never took that step. So, instead of a public welfare state, we got a private one, administered for only some workers and paid for by their employers. Sooner or later, this arrangement was bound to fail.”