There is a city in the US that has not had a Republican mayor since 1962 and no Republicans on its city council since 1994. Not surprisingly, this city is a beacon of prosperity and a shining example of the triumph of progressive public policy. I am speaking, of course, of Detroit.
Detroit did everything right: they have a high minimum wage, a large and well-paid public sector workforce, strong unions, high education spending, and a tax system that makes sure the rich pay their fair share. Is it any wonder that Detroit has the lowest rates of poverty and unemployment in the nation?
Detroit’s strong gun laws have also made it America’s safest city. It has the lowest homicide and crime rate of any city in the country. Detroit’s high education spending has led to it having the nation’s lowest high school drop-out rate, as well as the lowest rate of illiteracy. For these reasons, people have been flocking to Detroit and its real estate market is booming. This teeming metropolis is also a bastion of racial harmony with its many mixed neighborhoods.
The city’s car factories are thriving as well, thanks to the UAW, which helped make GM America’s top exporter. In 2008, GM did so well that it donated several billion dollars to the government to help pay down the national debt. Detroit itself is debt free thanks to the sound fiscal policies of the Democrats.
Other cities and states have decided to follow Detroit’s example. California has been booming ever since it enacted Detroit’s policies. People continue to flock there away from poorly-governed Republican strongholds like Texas.
Despite Detroit’s obvious success, many are reluctant to try the winning formula. So in the next election, remember to vote only for progressives. A vote for progressives is a vote for a strong middle class, good education, and low crime.
Just like Detroit.
Comments
102 responses to “Detroit: Progressive Paradise”
“Detroit’s strong gun laws”
I didn’t know they were more restrictive than the state. And I was under the impression that the state laws were pretty decent
This appears to be Detroit’s current state of law.
NOTE: NO ORBITAL BOMBARDMENT PLATFORMS!
What about rocks, lobbed from the moon?
They tend to land back on the moon as the proper launch mechanism has not been built.
Thankfully, Detroit’s gun laws match the rest of the state, as Michigan has forbidden cities from regulating firearms.
Detroit’s official ordinance that is on the books is a bit more stringent, but no longer in force.
OT: Shelley Zhang goes HAM with some truth about socialism and women’s ‘rights’.
Heh. Must be why Obama was always going on about how it’s easier to govern in China. It really is a progtopia.
Woo-hoo!
For all your shit, I bet your silly republican city doesn’t have this, which makes up for everything.
Now if only they had a statue of Arnold as Dutch, grasping hands and flexing with Carl Weathers, I would move there regardless of public policy.
Arnold and Carl aren’t relevant to Detroit, Robocop is.
Now L.A. might have to put up a statue of Danny Glover kicking the shit out of a Predator.
The best scene from Robocop.
I knew I shouldn’t have clicked.
Stated vs. revealed preference.
You love it.
Yeahhhhhh…….. no
I can handle a Golden Power Bomb. But cyborgs shooting off people’s junk? I gotta draw the line somewhere.
Damn cyborgs, it’s always cyborgs.
Allow me to soothe your pain.
HM…you are doing the Lord of Dat Azz’s work. Thank you.
You’re a bad. bad man HM, and I love you. (No Homo)
Well then, that makes things much better.
RoboMohel
Arnold and Carl are relevant to every city with a population of greater than 20,000. I know you only have a smattering of those up north, but they’re actually quite common here : P
I wouldn’t just move there, I’d work hard to build a fortune and donate it to the city if they built 60-ft golden statues of these fine fellows.
You’d build statues of traitor Primarchs? HERETIC!
I’ve built statutes of [REDACTED] and {REDACTED] too!
I also ordered them destroyed and Redacted.
Hey, they helped to conquer the galaxy in the name of Humanity, so they get their statues as well.
If you read the novels, part of what drove Horus Lupercal over the edge was seeing a vision of the future in which his, and the Traitor Primarchs, didn’t have statues anywhere along with the Loyalists.
Of course, the joke was that it was only because of the actions he still had the chance to avoid that caused said future, but Chaos is shitty that way.
I always found that to be goofy. “Raah weird fever dream shows I have no statues, time to betray the Emprah!”
That fist is symbolic of the destruction it inflicted on the city.
Democrats. Is there nothing they can’t do?
It’s the biggest nut battering ram I’ve seen. *waits for replies*
They keep voting them in, ergo they must enjoy the fisting. Stateomasochists.
Stateomascochists
That’s gold, Zero, gold!
No link to A Fistful of Yen? I am disappoint.
The terrible state of the city of Detroit is due to the influence of Omni Consumer Products. Outside of their influence the city would be a paradise.
I blame Dick Jones.
Now that you’ve admitted who you work for, I can kill you with a data spike to the neck.
Data spike is what I call my penis.
My neck is fat enough to have a few folds, but I don’t believe they’re enough to make it pleasurable for your data spike.
Personally I would blame the GUNS GUNS GUNS.
“not had a Republican mayor since 1962 and no Republicans on its city council since 1994”
Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since the 1950’s, although they still do have one lonely Republican alderman (always from the same area).
More or less, I think the problems with Detroit started with Mayor Cavanaugh who was the darling of the far-left in his day. He inherited a declining City (in terms of population) and his solution was to institute an income tax. This inevitably resulted in further population declines. Chicago, in the meantime, had Richard J. Daley around the same time who inherited a declining City (in terms of population), but chose to keep taxes low and opposed more business regulation.
Times have changed, obviously, and there’s more to it, but just a thought
Yeah, it’s not so much the party affiliation as the ideological affiliation that counts. A city run by progressives, under any banner, will generally be worse off than one run by someone, under any banner, who recognizes that there are limits to what the government can do. The more successful Democratic mayors (or just politicians in general) tend to be the least “progressive”.
Good job Derp.
OT: There’s trouble in Trumpland. Current headline on Breitbart:
“7 reasons why Obamacare 2.0 is all but guaranteed to impose crushing costs on voters, hurt Trump’s base, and hand power back to the Democrats”
Big Trouble in Little Trumpland
We need something out of Rand Paul’s six demon bag to fix this mess. Where’s Jack Burton when we need him?
Well, it’s like ol’ Jack Burton always says – Obamacare Jr. is going to suck just as much.
When was the last time Baltimore had a Republican mayor? Or DC?
I think there’s a great article to be written for this site examining the history and current voting patterns of demographic blocks, and exploring how exactly democrats got their absolute stone-cold lead-pipe lock on the black vote.
But it would need to be written by someone less boorish than myself, because I’d pepper it with wildly inappropriate racist jokes.
I think another examination would be how Democrats got a lock on affluent white urban voters. That is the real base of the modern Democratic Party. Their party is like Williamsburg: mainly young upper class whites who set the culture with a few minorities sprinkled here and there.
Democrats own the major cities. There has to be a common thread there.
As Just Say’n points out, they also have a lock on the better-off urban whites.
What is it about living in a big city that makes people so damn liberal?
We need our big city commenters to weigh in here.
I don’t know, because growing up in a city made me hate liberal policies.
Wealthier whites in urban areas tend to be childless, and generally one becomes less liberal (in the Dem sense) the more children one has.
Wait, what?
You disagree? I mean, it’s hardly an ironclad thing but I think it’s true more often than not.
@Chipwooder
Yeah. When I think I shit-load of kids, I think of this.
This is a very good point. Rich urban whites typically are not married (particularly the young) and rarely have children. For one reason or another, being married with children is actually the greatest determinant in how you vote and how you view government programs (more than race or income). I read a study about that somewhere.
It’s a combination of things.
One is that ‘community’ tends to break down in big cities, so its absence becomes a political rallying point (i.e. we wish we had it, so politicians who promise to ‘bring it back’ get points). Likewise, since big cities are full of crowds of anonymous people, there’s less in the way of ‘community boundaries’ and you’re going to get substantially more unsavory enclaves of people than you’re likely to see in the average small town, and thus less trust in the ‘community’ to be able to police bad behaviors, and thus a perceived need for government to step in.
On the flip-side, there’s distaste for the ‘socially conservative’ end of the national Republican Party which tends to appeal precisely more to those small town, ‘down-home’ communities that do have a higher level of trust along with significantly less presence of, and tolerance for, the diversity that is inherent in large cities (just through the lived experience of what’s familiar and what’s not, not necessarily because of the racism that Dems see everywhere they look).
This also speaks to why Democrats have had a lock on ‘the minority vote’ for so long – the perception that the Republicans are the ‘down-home white people’ party and, thus, are not even a viable option as compared with simply trying to influence the Democrats, as hopeless as that seems at times. And to call a spade a spade, the national Republican Party has embraced that identity as ‘the Real Americans’ up until pretty recently.
This is changing right now, though. I’m more and more convinced with each passing day that the strategy that has served the Dems so well for the past half-century is now blowing up in their faces, and they don’t know what to do about it. When all you can do is scream that the party of Ben Carson and Marco Rubio are White Supremacists, you’re out of turds to throw.
This is true. Big cities lack communities, now. I think this is a symptom of the problem, though. There are far less families that live in big cities anymore. Families create communities. Singles that rent and are more transient do not create communities.
There may be something to that.
At least, I think one could argue that in big cities your families are going to be either rich enough to be able to deal with raising a family in a big city (we left Oakland exactly because we’re not), or too poor to leave the city.
This leaves you with a context that really reinforces the ‘income inequality’ narrative for rich, big-city liberals, since the mid-range people tend to move to the suburbs when they have kids. This prods the rich liberals into supporting progressive policies that make them feel like they’re helping the Poors, while the Poors aren’t going to argue with the rich liberal who’s saying “I feel like we should all be giving you more money than you currently have.”
Sometimes I listen to KPFA, which is the local SF Bay Area commie radio station, and they commonly feature far-left minority voices – way too far left for NPR, for example. They mostly complain about the same things we do – licensing laws, police brutality, criminal justice inequities, excessive taxation (on them), etc., but they see Red Team rhetoric on such things as outright lies (can you imagine?). Thus, their tone tends to be “Democrats! Fucking useless! But at least they’re not Republicans, amirite?”
I think it is that cities provide more opportunity for conflict, which gives rise to a desire for someone to solve said conflict, and that someone is usually government (since courts are the civilized way to settle intractable disputes, and since courts are necessarily run by the government, people begin to turn to the government to solve all disputes, even tractable ones).
Baltimore was 1963, according to that graphic Instapundit posts all the time. Chicago was 1925.
DC has only had elected mayors since 1975. All have been Democrats. It had several different forms of government before that, all of them appointed by the president.
The State of Rhode Island has not had a Team Red majority in their legislature for.. 80 years or so.
As you might imagine, this has turned Rhode Island into a shining beacon on a … uh.. floodplain… with uh… low taxes and limited regulation and nothing but economic and social success for all.
I’m told that anything wrong with the state remains the fault of occasional Team Red governors and/or the 15% minority of Team Red in the legislature.
They should elect Jeff Probst. Anybody causing trouble gets voted off at tribal council, unless they managed to find the hidden immunity idol.
Montreal is a city slowly withering away. Once the leading metropolis in Canada it’s been left in the dust by Toronto. It’s a city that has always had persistently high poverty rates so I love to point out to Montrealers who think the solution is to increase government programs that since the arrival of the welfare state poverty has INCREASED. In other words, for all the taxes we pay to ‘help the poor’ things have gotten progressively (pun intended) worse. I’ve never ever never ever seen a report that said, ‘hey, it’s working! We’re winning!’ Nope. Instead we get ‘gee, what no come idears no work? need more money!’ It’s true, for some reason, Canadian cities manage to avoid the American style of ghettoes and violence (which I guess keeps us in a perpetual state of splendid bliss avoiding the reality) but things aren’t exactly great either.
http://globalnews.ca/news/1685376/25-years-since-canada-vowed-to-end-child-poverty-where-are-we-now/
http://globalnews.ca/news/432924/report-shows-montreal-remains-one-of-the-poorest-cities-in-canada/
Hey, at least your bums are bilingual.
OK, I laughed.
Even tri-lingual!
Shouldn’t you be working?
HEY!
I’m currently in the office with one of my educators who is watching over a sick kid waiting for the parents to pick him up.
When state employees supervise a subordinate like that, we’re accused of featherbedding.
Kids first, brah.
My wife was taken aback a little when after we ignored the panhandler who hit us up in French, he immediately switched to the King’s English.
My mom swore off Montreal a couple years ago when she went there, parked, got ticketed, and found that an extra hundred dollars had been slapped on the ticket in order to ‘fund shelters for victims of domestic abuse’. She was pretty pissed.
So like 5 US dollars, what’s the big problem?
It’s more the moral outrage than the money.
You get more of what you subsidize.
Canadian cities manage to avoid the American style of ghettoes and violence
Meh, parts of Toronto and Vancouver easily fill that role. A lot of it has to do with way lower population density, and the way cities tend to develop by very gradually absorbing towns around them.
Eh, on a much smaller scale. There’s nothing akin to, say, Camden in Canada.
New Jersey and New York alone has close to the population of the entirety of Canada. Density matters a lot. We only have five cities that are larger than a million people, they’re spread out across the country, and two of them barely count.
and two of them barely count
Hmm, pols from one of them were running your little frozen country for like 8 years until just recently.
/a Calgary fan from across the border
I’m talking about Edmonton and Ottawa (Ottawa counts Gatineau and Hull in their population figures most of the time).
Then you have 6 big cities — I still count Vancouver among the most beautiful big cities in N. America.
And I actually meant *six cities.
Yeh. I guess. I hear Winnipeg is rough too.
I don’t get Montreal. It should be the grandest city in North America. It has absolutely everything going for it. How they continue to mess it up I don’t understand.
A: They’re French
B: They’re Canadians
C: Aren’t the first two enough of an explaination?
A: Yes.
B: Fuck you.
C: French nationalism is one hell of a drug.
You don’t really mean that, if you did, there would be a sorey at the end.
I’m from northern Ontario. We eat the polite Canadians up here.
‘There’s a town in North Ontario…’
Is that where you’re from?
Pfft, Young is a southern boy. Sudbury or higher counts.
I did a small unit exchange with the Royal Canadian Dragoons in Petawawa, which I guess isn’t really ‘northern’, but it is north of most of the people?
This was in 1992?
Petawawa’s eastern Ontario, it’s in the Ottawa river valley.
Basically, anything east past Kingston? Eastern Ontario. Anything west past Toronto? Western Ontario. Anything south of Sudbury? Southern Ontario.
Sorry, I should have used the proper Ethnonym – Canukistanis.
Oh, speaking of, twice in the last month I’ve seen Silver Alerts (when did those become a thing?) for cars with Quebec license plates.
Can’t wait for the snowbirds to go home.
JB, the $64k question.
A LOT of it has to do with 1976 and the nationalism that grips this place; not to mention the hard socialism.
Those things don’t help.
It should never, at the very least, ever fallen so far back of Toronto.
“Hey, let’s try to avoid the business language of the world as much as possible. Wait, what’s this city do again?”
And yet they have the Unibroue brewery, which is consistently excellent.
It has its moments.
Is this the owner?
The Great Unibroue
I like the ones that are a little more subtle, that Poe’s Law comes into play.
I remember reading a couple stories once about new free market-y alternatives for transportation and security emerging from the government failure in Detroit.
Have those been crushed?
I think that there were some libertarian billionaires threatening to buy an island and start a libertopia. And as usual, that ruined everything.
Maybe Detroit should host the Olympics, that would turn things around.
You could have done this article on an entire country, Venezuela. But I suppose you wanted to save the best example of progressive utopia for later.
Detroit was a little dicey before, but really went downhill after the 1967 riot. White flight accelerated after that. Even my dad, out in the suburbs, bought a gun. There are now neighborhoods reverting to pasture. And in the northern part of the state, some roads are being converted back to gravel, because they cost less to maintain than real pavement.
And people wonder why Michigan voted for Trump.