The city of Detroit agreed this week to raze the Joe Louis Arena, the home of the Red Wings hockey team, and hand the land over to one of its corporate creditors in order to satisfy a small portion of a $1 billion debt.
The move brings the Motor City closer to resolving its June 23, 2013 bankruptcy filing. The settlement will leave creditors with pennies on the dollar and retired public employees with only about half of what they were promised.
Municipal bankruptcy was the only way for Detroit, which until recently ran annual deficits as high as $380 million, to discharge its $18.5 billion in debt. Years of dramatically overstaffed city agencies, over-generous retirement promises to public employee unions, and white-elephant development projects had left the city unable to police its streets, keep street lamps on, maintain parks, or provide other basic government services, no matter how much the city government raised taxes.
The lesson of Detroit is one that governments everywhere can learn: In a world with finite resources, governments that try to do too much end up neglecting even the essential.
Detroit’s case is a microcosm of what Americans are now experiencing nationwide in several different areas — the evident inability of public health officials to manage the Ebola scare competently is just one of them.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that instructed a mildly symptomatic patient with known exposure to Ebola to board a commercial flight this week, spends millions annually on bonuses for top employees, bicycle paths, farmers markets, and other luxuries.
Meanwhile, the agency, which was founded as the Communicable Disease Center, has failed to train public health personnel to recognize Ebola or protect themselves properly with the safety gear available.
One would assume that before investing in locally grown produce, an agency that was founded to stop the spread of communicable diseases would have first ensures that there are more than nine beds in biocontainment units in the entire United States of America. But one would be wrong in that assumption.
Nigel Lawson, who served as Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, famously said that “To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.”
It is too late for Detroit, whose appetite for big government resulted in a city devouring itself from within, leaving its public employees stranded and its creditors swinging in the breeze. But perhaps Congress and federal officials can learn before it’s too late.
Even if they enjoy using the money the nation has for disease control and vaccine research to fund instead research on origami condoms and to appease politically active bicyclists, public health bureaucrats might do better in the future putting their massive budgets toward basic preparedness for precisely the kind of emergency the CDC was created to address.
