Cities and counties have no way out of the vicious cycle. Rising deficits and debts force new tax hikes and new cuts in schools, cops and firemen. Residents see the town going down, and pack and leave.
San Bernardino, Calif., has now followed Stockton into bankruptcy.
Harrisburg and Scranton, Pa., and Jefferson County, Ala., home to Birmingham, are already there to welcome them.
Detroit has been taken into receivership by Michigan. A plan under discussion is to level a fourth of the city and reconvert it into the pasture and farmland it used to be a century ago.
On the Web, one may find a pictorial tale of two cities: Hiroshima, a smoking flattened ruin in 1945, now a beautiful gleaming metropolis. And Detroit, forge and furnace of democracy in 1945, today resembling Dresden after Bomber Command paid its visit.
Other American cities are exploring bankruptcy to escape from under the mountain of debt they have amassed or to get out of contracts that an earlier generation of politicians negotiated.
No longer shameful, bankruptcy is now seen as an option for U.S. cities. The crisis of the public sector has come to River City.
What happened to us?
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