The urban crusaders at Next City, a nonprofit media organization in Philadelphia, use Detroit as Exhibit A for contrasting federal foreign aid and dollars steered to needy cities at home.
No subtlety is involved.
"Here Is Every Foreign Country That Gets More Federal Aid Than Detroit" says the headline on an article by Bill Bradley -- a 2007 WMU grad, not the former New Jersey senator and NBA star.
"Detroit vs. the World" decalres type atop a chart showing 32 foreign countries getting more from Washington than the $108.2 million in direct federal aid that Next City says Detroit gets in fiscal 2014.
Bradley, a freelance writer who moved from Kalamazoo to Brooklyn, acknowledges that "American cities get help from the government in other forms, such as tax breaks, housing programs and federal grants for blight removal."
So the $108.2 million in direct aid is not the sole form of help that Washington is shipping off to the Motor City.
But that shouldn’t stop Americans from asking: When will the government quit spending so much money overseas and start investing more in our own cities?
Oftentimes, the first thing people say when they see Detroit’s hulking ruins and blight is, “It looks like a third world country.”
His short piece and a chart are based on "raw numbers," as the lead paragraph notes, not on per-capita comparisons -- something two readers jump on. "You need a version of this chart that is normalized against population," posts one.
Another recalculates the figures that way and comes up with just one foreign aid recipient -- Israel -- that's ahead of Detroit.
-- Alan Stamm
