Oh For God's Sake Obama's Giving the Same Stupid "Big Pivot Speech on the Economy" He's Given 60 Times Since 2010

Recap:

Whatev's. If you care about this horror show, it's on MSNBC. Even Obama's fellative allies in the media say this speech will be empty of anything new andentirely useless.

Meanwhile, Detroit looms as a backdrop, a facts-on-the-ground indictment of ObamaNomics. Major Garrett writes:

Obama’s 2011 speech described a Detroit that can only be described as a myth wrapped in a wish inside a dream.

“This is a city that’s been to heck and back,” Obama said. “And while there are still a lot of challenges here, I see a city that’s coming back.”

Obama referenced “tough choices” made to bail out GM and Fiat-Chrysler and also hailed the birth of a new wave of high-tech employment. “We said American workers could manufacture the best products in the world. So we invested in high-tech manufacturing and we invested in clean energy,” he said. “And right now, there’s an advanced-battery industry taking root here in Michigan that barely existed before.”

The biggest factory in this supposed new trend, Massachusetts-based A123 Systems, had plans to employ 5,900 workers nationwide to build lithium-ion batteries. In Detroit, A123 Systems never employed more than 1,000. The Energy Department awarded A123 Systems a $249 million grant to boost production. It filed forbankruptcy in 2012 and was still receiving DOE largesse. A judge approved the bankruptcy in 2013.

In other words, the Detroit-area advanced-battery industry Obama said “barely existed before” his 2011 speech now … barely exists.

Rich Lowry writes of Detroit as Suicide By Government.

The case of the city of Detroit isn’t much of a murder mystery. Various suspects have been fingered in its demise: The global economy. The fall of the auto industry. The decline of manufacturing generally. But it’s simpler than that. Detroit died of its own hand.

The city undertook a controlled experiment in what happens if you are governed by a toxic combination of Great Society big spenders, race hustlers, crooks, public-sector unions, and ineffectual reformers. It spent and misgoverned itself into the ground. It tried to defy the axiom of the late economist Herb Stein that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Detroit’s bout of self-destruction lasted for a few decades, and now may finally stop only when there is little left to destroy.

...

The city’s downfall started long before anyone imagined that the Big Three would ever be anything but overwhelmingly dominant. Hardly anyone had heard of Toyota in 1967, when riots ripped the city and a long crime wave began that made it unlivable. According to Henry Payne of the Detroit News, the murder rate climbed from 13 per 100,000 residents in 1966 to 51 per 100,000 by 1976.

It was the city’s dysfunction that made it unappealing to the auto companies rather than the diminished state of the auto companies that made the city dysfunctional. The city’s mayor for 20 years, Coleman Young, was an ethically challenged black nationalist who hated the suburbs. Under Young, journalist Zev Chafets writes, Detroit had “all the trappings of a third-world city — the showcase projects, an external enemy, and the cult of personality.” And this was in the good old days of the 1970s and 1980s.

Detroit

Coming to a national government near you.

posted by Ace at 01:36 PM

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