On October 12, Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, filed for bankruptcy. The move took most of America by surprise—

headlines on CNN and the Drudge Report played the story as breaking news. It was not. Harrisburg’s failure has been so long in the offing that last June the state legislature passed a law forbidding the city from declaring bankruptcy until July 2012. (The city will challenge this law in court.) People in Pennsylvania have been waiting for Harrisburg to go broke for a long time.