The Beginning Of The End: Detroit Edition.

This sucks.  Detroit Is Halting Garbage Pickup, Police Patrols In 20% Of City: Expect Bankruptcy In 2011

Excerpts:

In a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable one last time, Mayor Bing's latest plan is to cutoff city services including road repairs, police patrols, street lights, and garbage collection in 20% of Detroit.

City officials suggest this will not shrink the size of the city. Perhaps it won't shrink Detroit on Google Maps. However, Bing's plan would effectively surrender 20% of the city to gangs and the homeless.
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The Wall Street Journal discusses Bing's plan in Less Than a Full-Service City

More than 20% of Detroit's 139 square miles could go without key municipal services under a new plan being developed for the city, with as few as seven neighborhoods seen as meriting the city's full resources

Those details, outlined by Detroit planning officials this week, offer the clearest picture yet of how Mayor Dave Bing intends to execute what has become his signature program: reconfiguring Detroit to reflect its declining population and fiscal health. Yet the blueprint still leaves large legal and financial questions unresolved.

Mr. Bing's staff wants to concentrate Detroit's remaining population—expected to be less than 900,000 after this year's Census count—and limited local, state and federal dollars in the most viable swaths of the city, while other sectors could go without such services as garbage pickup, police patrols, road repair and street lights.

After the Global Economic Collapse, many cities will devolve into what the abandoned 20 percent of Detroit will become shortly.  The chaos will begin there almost immediately after the societal net of government services disappears.  I hope Mayor Bing and his administration reconsider this catastrophic course of action.  In our society, there has always been a thin line separating order from anarchy.  Like it or not my Libertarian friends, much of it has to do with established laws and a governmental system of enforcement.  If this plan is carried out, people will be shocked to see how quickly lawlessness will fill the void.  There will be murders; murders and fires.  Will the city stand by as this happens?  Really?

As for the money/budget situation, I can't think of a more urgent example that would benefit from marijuana's legalization and subsequent taxation.  Once the most powerful manufacturing hub of the most powerful nation on earth, Detroit has become the metaphor of The American Dream Destroyed.  Legal and Taxed pot represents the inventive spirit and innovation-despite-adversity that could, Could reverse the downward momentum for what was once one of America's premier cities.. 

But it most likely won't happen.  It's too bad that Reefer Madness phobia still exists in this country.  Otherwise sound fiscal and societal avenues aren't ever considered because of hateful anti-Mexican, paper industry propaganda..