Democrat run cities

Daniel Howes
Michigan: Blueprint to crisis
Back when Michigan's economy was merely troubled -- before $4-a-gallon gas and frozen credit markets pushed the auto industry into free-fall -- Gov. Jennifer Granholm warned the Big Mitten's deepening economic problems could presage what lay ahead for the nation.
I and other skeptics chortled, figuring the collective denial of economic reality, anti-business rhetoric in Lansing, rote acceptance of labor's influence in policy-making, and higher tax loads on individuals and companies here couldn't possibly go national. The combination was too toxic, too self-defeating, too steeped in a last-century worldview that had been discredited by events and chronic failure.
But I was wrong.
Less than two months into a new administration in Washington, much of the tone and substance coming from the Obama White House and its allies in a Democratic-controlled Congress sound eerily familiar to weary Michigan ears. At least they should.
There's money for education, health care and alternative technology. There's the prospect of higher tax loads for some individuals and higher energy prices for all. There's a push to increase the influence of the labor lobby by making organizing easier. There are rhetorical shots at business, some undeserved. There's even a Harvard Law-educated CEO who gives a great speech.
Been there, done that.
Come to Michigan, America, to see where some of this could lead if a) it's not accompanied by plain recognition that business is the most effective creator of jobs and b) the boss slow-walks remedies to serious problems, as Obama is doing on the banking crisis.
Here, we have the nation's highest unemployment rate, a dubious distinction that shows no sign of abating.
We have an economic icon whose leaders need federal assistance because their industry is on the verge of collapse. Boosters of Detroit would contend this increasingly likely outcome has been building for just the past few months, but the truth is that it's been coming for years, a legacy of management mistakes, labor over-reach and political inertia.
We have the poorest major city in America. Detroit's schools are an embarrassing failure and under state supervision. Detroit's finances are a mess, and its City Council has become a caricature of itself -- when clips of its latest shenanigans aren't drawing hits on YouTube, that is.
We have a civic culture, born of an affluent past, that tends to glorify the good ol' days when it isn't wallowing in victimhood or engaging in the kind of childish us vs. them spats that impede progress and cloud recognition that common problems demand common solutions.
We have a state capital whose strongest leaders aren't the governor, the speaker of the House or the Senate majority leader. They're the heads of the United Auto Workers and the Michigan Education Association, the two biggest obstacles to the structural reform of state and local government despite steadily declining tax revenues, population and per capita incomes.
We have a record of hectoring the private sector. For evidence, see Granholm's statement on the October 2005 bankruptcy of Delphi Corp. or the first attempt at state business tax reform. See, too, decisions by Comerica Inc., Volkswagen of America and Pfizer Corp. to bolt Michigan because its business climate was deemed to be a liability.
Most of all, we have a penchant for addressing the symptoms of problems because attacking the root causes is too hard. It doesn't work.