Obviously I disagree with the previous comment insofar as it relates to Clarke's proposal. Of course it would have made more sense to spend a trillion dollars on US cities than on a pointless war, but that would obviously not have been politically possible either. It is conceivable that you could come up with a program that would provide a lot of money to cities and that could pass Congress [[not this Congress, of course). That has happened in the past. But there has never been and is very unlikely ever to be a Congress that would be willing to say "Detroit, [[and only Detroit, because it is so special and people who lived there 70 years ago helped win WWII) gets to keep its citizens' federal taxes and spend them without any further oversight from Congress."

The conversation that a parochial proposal of this kind starts is likely to be short and unrewarding. Detroit's issues are not mostly about Detroit; they are about a changing economy and a concentration of poverty and dysfunction that is becoming a common pattern around the country. I think that a fruitful conversation has to be be about measures that are more broadly applicable across the US.