The city of Detroit, MI is like the poster child for progressive policies gone wrong. The city is headed towards bankruptcy. The productive citizens have moved away in droves. Public sector workers outnumber private sector workers, and the number of adults working barely outnumbers those who don’t work. Terrence Jeffrey laid it all out in a Washington Examiner column, and how if President Obama has his way all of America will soon resemble Detroit.

President Obama traveled to Michigan this week and made his case for class war in defense of the welfare state.

We need to take more money from the rich, he said, or schools will not be able to afford books, students will not be able to afford college and disabled children will not get health care.

“Our economic success has never come from the top down,” said Obama. “It comes from the middle out. It comes from the bottom up.”

Obama spoke these words a few miles from Detroit — the reductio ad absurdum of his argument.

Obama’s economic and moral vision has played out in that city. What he seeks has been achieved there.

[...]

Very few of the people who are staying out of the labor force in Detroit are staying out because they are stay-at-home moms with working husbands. Of the 264,209 households in Detroit, only 24,275 — or 9.2 percent — are married couple families with children under 18. Another 78,438 households — or 29.7 percent of the total — are families headed by women with no husband present. Of these, 43,742 have children under 18.

There were 12,103 babies born in Detroit in the 12 months prior to the Census Bureau survey, and 9,124 of them — or 75.4 percent — were born to unmarried women.

Of the 363,281 housing units in Detroit, 99,072 are vacant. Indeed, vacant houses have become a powerful visual symbol of what advancing socialism has done to the city. Traditional family life is nearing extinction in this once vibrant corner of America.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Linked by Sentry Journal and The Pirate’s Cove – thanks!