Why raising taxes is nessecary

[Dinner]

Why isn't Pittsburgh as bad as Detroit then?

Believe it or not they were more diversified and actually had a better educated workforce. They also likely had better political leadership as they always knew they were a second stringer instead of one of the nation's top cities where as people in Detroit seemed to be in denial believing that wishing things would bounce back would make them bounce back so they never changed, never adapted, and things just got worse and worse.

[giblets]

Oh for god's sake. If they couldn't find enough ****ing sugar to eat, there's more going on here than not enough food stamps.

Poor people have other problems besides not enough food stamps?

[Elok]

Oh for god's sake. If they couldn't find enough ****ing sugar to eat, there's more going on here than not enough food stamps.

Yes. There's also diabetes.

[notyoueither]

From what I understand the auto industry is still huge in the area. What happened is all the people who work in it (and most everything else of consequence) moved to surrounding communities. It's the city itself that is screwed. The metro area is still doing quite well as a whole.

[Colonâ„¢]

From what I understand the auto industry is still huge in the area. What happened is all the people who work in it (and most everything else of consequence) moved to surrounding communities. It's the city itself that is screwed. The metro area is still doing quite well as a whole.

Yeah, I also noticed that the metro population is only a little down from its peak. The thing is though that in most places, the metro population keeps growing even if the city proper stagnates or shrinks.

Here's a pretty nice table that compares metro areas over time: http://www.peakbagger.com/pbgeog/histmetropop.aspx

In 1980 Detroit was still the 5th largest metro area, but by 2010 it had already tumbled to the 12th place, with almost every other metro area growing in absolute terms.

[Al B. Sure!]

Umm?

[Elok]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy

[giblets]

Good thing we have a trained Englishist here.

[Dinner]

From what I understand the auto industry is still huge in the area. What happened is all the people who work in it (and most everything else of consequence) moved to surrounding communities. It's the city itself that is screwed. The metro area is still doing quite well as a whole.

There are only two plants left in the city limits and while GM is still officially based there most of the others have moved outside the city limits for tax reasons even if they're still in the same area; like Ford did in Dearborn) and much of the actual assembly work is now done in other states instead of all being concentrated in the Detroit area as it was in the 1920's through 1960's. Really the whole city was entirely based upon one industry and if you didn't directly work in that industry you either worked for a supplier to that industry or you worked in the service sector and all of your customers worked in that industry. The city's economy was a stool with only one leg. Worse education levels were horrible in the city as students would drop out of high school or refuse to go to college because the auto companies didn't care if you were educated as long as you could turn a wrench. Only the white collar workers worried about education. That meant the city had an extremely high population of people with no other skills, no education to speak of, and that made it extremely hard to attract different industries or start ups even in the best of times especially since the high wages paid by the automakers tended to increase wages in everything else thus making any other line of business too costly because they had to offer hire wages just to keep workers from running off to get a job at Packard or one of the other automakers.

[regexcellent]

There are only two plants left in the city limits and while GM is still officially based there most of the others have moved outside the city limits for tax reasons even if they're still in the same area; like Ford did in Dearborn)

Why raising taxes wouldn't help.

[Elok]

Good thing we have a trained Englishist here.

Linking to the article on "equivocation" was also an option there.

[Dinner]

WRT tax rates: I agree that isn't good but you'd have to be blind not to understand why that was necessary. In the 1940's through 1980's they signed up for lots of long term obligations which legally under state law they can't ditch even in bankruptcy (and I'm willing to bet that even with this bankruptcy the court will still find them on the hook for most if not all of them) so they put themselves in a catch-22 when the population started falling for dozens of reasons only one of which was tax rates. It's a very simplistic world you're living in but maybe that makes you feel better some how.

Honestly, the metro region is still doing fairly well but the city itself has been in trouble since the 1960's largely due to white flight. During WW2 the city started attracting a huge influx of black people from the south as high wages and the promise of getting out from under Jim Crow were big draws but starting in the 1950's the whites started moving to suburbs and then having the suburbs declare themselves independent cities thus cutting the city off from most of the tax base of the people who actually used city services (like roads into downtown, etc...). Then you just add in the general aging of everything in the city with the lack on inward investment due to the suburbs being where it is at (BTW this happened to most American cities through the 1980's) and you end up with Detroit in a downward spiral.

Now Detroit seems to have been particularly bad at adapting to the changing realities and the reasons are many. Part of it was the population was one of the least educated in the country, people would drop out of high school when they heard one of the car companies were hiring and unless you were a white collar engineer or manager education was meaningless to income. Second the high pay in the auto industry really killed any other industries which tried to pop up because they were competing for the same workers but really couldn't offer the same high pay and benefits so other industries actively avoided Detroit even when there wasn't a tax incentive to do so.

Finally the population death spiral with whites moving to the suburbs to get away from blacks then finally blacks moving to the suburbs and whites moving still further out.

[notyoueither]

There are only two plants left in the city limits and while GM is still officially based there most of the others have moved outside the city limits for tax reasons even if they're still in the same area; like Ford did in Dearborn) and much of the actual assembly work is now done in other states instead of all being concentrated in the Detroit area as it was in the 1920's through 1960's. Really the whole city was entirely based upon one industry and if you didn't directly work in that industry you either worked for a supplier to that industry or you worked in the service sector and all of your customers worked in that industry. The city's economy was a stool with only one leg. Worse education levels were horrible in the city as students would drop out of high school or refuse to go to college because the auto companies didn't care if you were educated as long as you could turn a wrench. Only the white collar workers worried about education. That meant the city had an extremely high population of people with no other skills, no education to speak of, and that made it extremely hard to attract different industries or start ups even in the best of times especially since the high wages paid by the automakers tended to increase wages in everything else thus making any other line of business too costly because they had to offer hire wages just to keep workers from running off to get a job at Packard or one of the other automakers.

OK. It seemed like you were saying the industry collapsed, period. It didn't. It's still huge in Michigan and the surrounding areas.

[regexcellent]

Yes. There's also diabetes.

Yeah well how ****ing poor do you have to be to unable buy a 5 pound bag of sugar? Seriously? Maybe lay off the cigarettes for a day or something, that will probably buy enough for several years.

e: just checked, $3 for a 5lb bag of sugar at my grocery store and it's not even a cheapo low end one like price right or whatever which probably has it for less.

[Hauldren Collider]

I bet you can get three dollars with ten minutes of begging on the street. Especially if my line was "help, I'm going to be hypoglycemic and enter shock if I don't get sugar into my system because I'm diabetic". If you can't find enough sugar to keep yourself from entering shock, you aren't trying hard enough. Hell, if you went into a McDonalds and asked for sugar for your diabetes, they'd probably just give it to you for free.

Additionally, if these people have type 2 diabetes then their problem is probably too much food.