If you want to understand what ails metro Detroit, why young people are so quick to leave, why it lags the rest of the nation in so many economic indicators, consider this passage from the Macomb Daily's coverage of Rick Snyder's speech to the Macomb County GOP's Lincoln Day dinner.
Macomb Daily: Appearing before the largest Macomb County Republican fundraiser of the year, Gov. Rick Snyder on Monday received hearty applause when he told the crowd that the state would not bail out bankrupt Detroit, but the clapping was noticeably less enthusiastic when he said that Michigan’s comeback cannot succeed without a Motown resurgence.
Imagine for a second if Snyder told this gathering of Macomb County-ites that Michigan could not succeed without a successful Oakland County or Ann Arbor or Grand Rapids. Do you imagine the applause would be "noticeably less enthusiastic"?
No, it would not.
Or imagine if Warren was in the midst of an emergency manager/bankruptcy process and Snyder, speaking to the Oakland County GOP's Lincoln Day dinner, said it was important to fix Warren because Michigan could not be successful if the state's third-largest city was a disaster. Do you think Oakland County would sit on their hands for that line?
No, they would not.
You'd think a bunch of local Republicans would give Snyder a standing ovation for finally trying to fix Detroit with some Republican-style tough love, but old prejudices die hard. Plenty of metro Detroiters sure seem think the region would be better off without, you know, Detroit.
Given what we know about the underlaying attitudes of that anti-Detroit sentiment, it's kind worth wondering how many of the 700,000 Detroiters these folks would be willing to take on as residents of their fine and prosperous county if Detroit simply shut down.
Just curious.
