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The City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy yesterday afternoon. It owes as much as $20 billion and there is no conceivable way that debt will ever be paid. The city offered its debtors 10 cents on the dollar but the debtors refused.

A good deal of the blame – rightly or wrongly – will be placed at the feet of municipal workers – sanitation, water, sewer, cops, firefighters and so on.

The pressure of ever-rising wages for no additional work, leading to ever-rising pension costs, plus ever increasing benefits and ever more closely defined work rules will likely be found to be at the bottom of all this.

But its not the unions’ fault. It is the fault of the elected officials – Democratic elected officials in Detroit – who didn’t have the, um … guts to ever say “No” to their largest voting bloc.

It has been said that the difference between public unions and unions at commercial companies is: private union leaders know that if their demands become too high, the company will go out of business and everyone will lose their job.

Public unions, until recently, just kept demanding, and getting, more while producing nothing new in terms of services they render. Union pensions tend to be so generous that taxpayers often end up paying almost full wages to three or four workers, only one of whom is still actually working, to do exactly the same job that one person had been paid to do in an earlier age. According to some estimates, retirees outnumber active workers 2-1.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Read more.