"Bankrupt Detroit is becoming a liability for the Democrats" says the headline on a commentary by a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
Consider the source is one reaction, given that writer Christopher Caldwell's home turf is at a neoconservative opinion magazine owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
His essay, though, appears in Financial Times -- an influential business daily based in London.
Something previously "unthinkable" is in play, says Caldwell, and he doesn't mean museum sales.
That a progressive Democratic city would contemplate selling off the Bruegels, Ruysdaels and Van Goghs in the Detroit Institute of Arts is embarrassing. That a progressive Democratic city would ask government employees to cough up part of their pensions is unthinkable. . . .
If the city with the most secure Democratic machine cannot guarantee the benefits of its public employees, . . . such a broken promise is a threat to the credibility of the Democratic Party’s entire enterprise.
Detroit retirees protest potential benefit reductions recently.
Got that? Public workers' retirement benefits trump education, immigration, the national economy and social issues.
Caldwell could need a big tub of Bengay®, because it seems like a painful stretch to hang a party's credibility on whether one city's AFSCME retirees collect 100% of benefits.
But the man from Murdoch-ville doesn't stop there in casting Detroit's pending pension cuts as a virtual survival test for the party that's not his.
The Democrats are likely to fight any pension haircuts from the ballot box to the backroom to the courtroom, with every weapon at their disposal. . . .
Caldwell, like others, sees non-adversarial coziness among city officials and union leaders as an important piece of the bankruptcy foundation.
Ultimately, Detroit is in a predicament because the principle on which good republican government rests – the separation of powers – broke down. Politicians were meant to drive a hard bargain with unions representing government workers. But over time the politicians who deal with unions came to be dependent on them. They may have been sitting on opposite sides of the table, but they had the same incentives – bigger pensions and benefits than the city could afford. (Astonishingly, Detroit still has defined benefit plans – costly pensions that are determined in advance by employees’ earnings.)
This kind of government largesse at taxpayer expense cannot last forever. But it is hard to imagine what will happen to U.S. big-city politics – or the get-out-the-vote efforts that it enables – once this arrangement is gone. It will not be given up without a fight.
There you have it -- that's what economics and business wonks are reading about our town this weekend under a sub-headline that says: "The Motor City is threatening to cause a pile-up in American politics."
We summarize. You decide.
