Jack Lessenberry Advocates Socialism to Bailout the City of Detroit
He warns not to be alarmist about it though. Jack Lessenberry, a political analyst for Michigan Radio (an NPR station out of Ann Arbor), thinks that the federal government ought to put uneducated, blue collar workers from his hometown of Detroit back to work. Here’s what he has to say:
Today I want to say something shocking, so if there are any small children standing nearby, you may want to cover their ears. Okay, here goes. More and more, it seems that what this state’s economy needs is a strong, swift dose of socialism.
What I am talking about is the fact that we learned yesterday that the real unemployment number in Detroit may be nearly half of the working age population – forty-five percent, to be precise.
There are no jobs in the private sector available for these folks today. What would be wrong with a federal program to put a large number of them to work for the public good?
Almost certainly, we could vastly improve our state’s physical condition and give these folks a better life with new meaning for a tiny fraction of what we spent to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq.
I’m assuming he comes from the school of thought that goes something like, “if Republicans can spend on defecits, surely we’re entitled to – after all, we’ll do something good with it.” (I’m amazed at how Democrats, Obama included, never get the blame for bailouts and war, but anyway…) What Mr. Lessenberry fails to realize is that a) our government doesn’t have money for anything b) we ought to be worried about getting out of debt instead of frivilously blowing on social projects and c) there is no returning to the “greatness for Detroit”; welcome to post-Detroit Michigan.
Perhaps those workers ought to go to Mexico or somewhere where fastening a bolt on an assembly line is still regarded as a skill in the work force? Of course, why would they do that when they could just milk the government, in particular HUD and the Michigan DHS, until the state is bled to the point of cutting state troopers and teachers? Maybe this will change if we can get a government with enough fortitude to take a stand against the poverty trap, but it’s not forseeable anytime soon.
When he says that we could improve our state’s physical condition, he means everyone not just Detroit, right? Give me a break. It’s over, Mr. Lessenberry – Detroit that is. And like I’ve said many times before, I cannot wait for redistricting in 2010, when presumably, power will shift west and we can be a state, not just Detroit and its baggage.