Let Detroit Go Bankrupt (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt (2008)

nytimes.com

11 pointsxavierlint10 comments

Title needs "(2008)". And the very first para suggests that the author is not-so-competent at foretelling the future:

> IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Guess he was pissed someone didn't donate to him.

> the author is not-so-competent at foretelling the future

Tesla hadn't become a thing then, I suppose.

3 years later the author of this article flip-flopped and renegade that opinion, because he needed votes from the workers whose jobs this bailout saved.

But the flip-flop didn't work.

Reality has a knack at making ideologies look pathetic.

Obama had won the election a couple of weeks beforehand, and the author of the article had mounted a strong campaign to be the GOP nominee

To add more context:

Mitt Romney, the author of this op-ed, went on to be the republican nominee in 2012. By then this had proven to be a very bad take.

I don't know that he ever really had much chance against an incumbent Obama, but I think this alone would have lost him Michigan... Romney was born there and his father was governer of Michigan so this came off as a betrayal. In any case, this was a good talking point if you wanted to argue he had a lack of vision.

To the credit of his vision, in a 2012 debate he said Russia was a concern in international affairs. Back then everyone looked at him funny like he didn't realize the Soviet Union had fallen 20 years earlier.

Cities in decline, like Detroit (population halved in only 35 years), need a plan. There are going to be a lot more such cities, especially in countries with low birth rates.

Not news, just an old opinion by some politician.

based.

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