HEARTLESS wrote: Imagine if they could read, they would have left America's Beirut long ago.
I agree with that. Anyone with skills and job prospects has gotten out. The worse it gets their the more hopeless the situation in that city because it's been bled of talent.
I wonder if you'd find a similar statistic in many of the dying rural small towns in America where children who get an education never return?
Functional illiteracy is much more common than people imagine. Years ago, when I lived in rural New England I worked with a literacy project there and the numbers were staggering.
HEARTLESS wrote: The convenience of cities is appealing to many, but there is a move to more rural self reliant living as well.
Except.....when gas prices rise and people in the more rural communities who have to commute to the city for employment decide it would be cheaper to move back to the city.
My dad grew up on a working ranch in very rural South Dakota from about his birth in 1920 to 1939 when he and his brothers joined the Coast Guard. I asked him how tough the great depression was. He said he knew they didn't have money, but never went hungry since they grew crops for food and animal feed.
And I wonder how much it costs per kid to educate in Detroit, I am betting more than JeffCo.
You have heard of enterprise zones, where they provide low-interest loans to get businesses to set up there? In Detroit, they should cut off all benefits to encourage people to move out and then they can raze the metropolis.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
The talent left because their pocketbooks were being bled dry by the "Tax the Rich" class warfare. The people voted in Democrats because Democrats gave them more benefits. The city then needed more revenue to make good on their benefits promises. That revenue can only come from those who produce, but you might anger the middle class if you taxed them more to keep the promises, so the answer comes in the form of higher taxes on the rich, higher property taxes and higher corporate taxes. Sound familiar to anyone? Isn't that what is being proposed on a national level now as the answer to the current problems? I guess if the problem is that the nation itself is not Detroit on steroids, then the proposed solutions will indeed cure the problem. If that isn't the problem, then the proposals emanating from the Oval Office won't solve them and will, in fact, create a new one - a nation that looks like Detroit.
