Nerd outplays Bing ( The Michigan View 2.23.11)

Posted by hpayne on February 24, 2011

bing

Governor Rick Snyder has set a new standard of leadership in Michigan and all other officials will be measured by it. Snyder’s State of the State and budget messages offered refreshingly bold visions for facing the state’s intractable problems square in the eye — regardless of the howls from entrenched interests.

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing’s State of Michigan’s Largest City Tuesday night did not live up to this standard.

Bing is a good man, a competent man, and a needed tonic after the corruption of the Kwame Kilpatrick era. But more than any jurisdiction in this state, Detroit needs to be “reinvented” to use Snyder’s term. “It is time to . . . develop a blueprint for our future and reestablish Detroit as the world’s most innovative city,” said Bing Tuesday.

But his plans do not live up to his own challenge. On taxes, on union wages, on education, and — most crucially — on the city’s non-existent family culture, Bing proposes little that would tackle the fundamental problems bleeding this city.

While Snyder seems to get bolder as he becomes more familiar with Michigan’s horrifying fiscal crisis, Bing seems to be falling back into Detroit’s familiar, soft platitudes. They’re the platitudes that oozed from the screen before Bing’s speech as Eminem’s now iconic (in Detroit anyway) “Detroit is back” Chrysler commercial warmed up the crowd. “I believe we have turned a corner,” Bing smiled. But Detroit has been turning corners for a decade and winding back at the same spot.

On taxes, Bing ignored the state’s discriminatory commuter tax which is a deterrent to entrepreneurs wanting to locate businesses in the city. So onerous is this tax that no less a city booster than Quicken Loans’ Dan Gilbert paid the tax costs of all 1,700 of his employees when he announced they would be moving to new company HQ downtown. Like Snyder and his dramatic proposal for the flattening of income and business taxes, a big move by Bing on income taxes would send a powerful message.

But there was none.

On union wages, Bing acknowledged the reality that public employee pensions are “unsustainable” and that the city needs to “achieve . . . cost savings.” Eliminating Detroit’s so-called living wage rule for contractors would send a powerful message that Bing is not only committed to sane wages but also to providing constituents the most affordable services. Sure, such a proposal would have brought union members into the streets – likely diverting them from Lansing where Snyder has been willing to endure Big Labor’s arrows for the public good.

But Bing did not address the living wage.

Or the city’s very high combined property taxes. Or its utility tax.

Nor did he propose anything radical on education. Thanks to Lansing, Detroit has been turning education corners since 1999 when David Adamany was appointed by Gov. John Engler as interim CEO for Detroit Public Schools. The new Aamany is another Lansing appointee, Robert Bobb who, like his predecessor, has found DPS to be a nest of entrenched scorpions. Enter Bing who make could Detroit the laboratory of America for charter school innovation – much as Milwaukee was two decades ago with school choice.

But the ex-Piston sharpshooter missed his shot.

But it is Bing’s failure to use the bully pulpit to address Detroit’s struggling families that will most haunt this city. Detroit is failing today primarily because black males have abandoned their families to a tragic 85 percent illegitimacy rate.

As study open study has shown, this is the seed that drives every pathology in inner cities like Detroit (and white rural areas like Appalachia). Fatherless males are more likely to drop out of school, to become adult illiterates, to engage in crime, to repeat the cycle. Bing rightly applauded the city’s reduction in murders under his watch. But at 34 killings per 100,000 residents, Detroit is still one of the four urban horsemen of the Apocalypse. Only New Orleans, Baltimore, St. Louis and Detroit among major U.S cities have murder rates above 30 per 100,000.

By contrast, Chicago has half Detroit’s murder rate. Where do want to move your family? Where do you want your kid moving for her first job? Game. Set. Match.

Detroit will continue to hemorrhage middle class population until leaders like Mayor Bing step up and preach that Detroit’s family culture is intolerable. That nurturing parents – especially for young boys – is essential to a successful society.

Until that happens, headlines like Tuesdays “Detroit pizza delivery man shoots, kills alleged robber” will continue to overshadow State of the City platitudes.

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