Melissa Harris-Perry's Delusional Assessment Of Detroit: When Gov't Small Enough To Drown In Tub

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F2SV...layer_embedded

Published on Jul 19, 20137/19/13 - MSNBC's panel guests on Friday's Now tackled the problems facing Detroit in the wake of their chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy filing -- the largest single municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States. The panel's predictable diagnosis was that Detroit suffered from a terminal lack of government. Where to begin... "Detroit's going to come back. It is going to come back," declared former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. "When you have a median home price of $45,000, people are going to go buy those houses sooner or later."

"But you've got to have a government to run the place," Dean snuck in at the end, ruining a perfectly reasonable observation.

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry went on to note that Detroit's tax base, e.g. the city's population, has declined dramatically in the last decade. Harris-Perry presents this fact as though former Detroit residents left -- estimated in 2011 at one resident every 22 minutes — on a whim without making a cost/benefit calculation as to whether to continue to reside in a city with one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation with a poverty rate of a staggering 40 percent.

Furthermore, since Detroit's population has fallen below 750,000, it was not legally allowed to collect income taxes from its residents until Gov. Rick Snyder and the state' legislature reduced that threshold to 600,000 two years ago. The city's population hovers today around 700,000 residents.

"But this lack of tax base is also exactly the thing that many Republicans would impose on us even when our cities have sufficient populations," Harris-Perry added. "Even when our communities have sufficient populations."

"This is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown if your bathtub and it is not a pretty picture," she said.