Quote Originally Posted by Dexlin View Post
Erik, I think you are being ridiculously dismissive of the effect of putting out 1,000+ workers all at once in this economy will mean. Yeah, it's going to be painful in a very real and macro sense for the local economy. Whether it's necessary or not is a whole other debate, but to pretend as if this won't be painful is just plain silly and really kind of insensitive. BTW, this won't just be painful for Detroit proper as many city workers live outside the city.

This is not even to get into the reality that even folks like Kirk Lewis said the other day that even spinning off something like lighting won't get lighting up to dependable standards for probably five years. So, not only do you have the immediate economic consequences of mass layoffs, but you have actual levels of many different city services that WILL get worse before they even have a possibility of getting better. What no one is really talking about are that some departments will be creatively destroyed, and some just destroyed altogether.
From a point of curiosity, how many employees are there for the city? I mean, If there's 700,000 people and 10,000 people lose there job, there's not doubt it will be painful. But to put things in perspective, we're really only talking about 1.5% of the city population, and many of those don't even live in the city limits.

There's no question that you cannot cut your way to success here. Even the GOP-tilted Detroit News states that Detroit needs to grow its way out of this. I think what's hard is that you can't grow until you cut first. And you can't know how you're going to grow until after the cutting is done.

The cutting will undoubtedly be painful. But the pain will also hit some more than others. There needs to be a shift made so that the private sector is the primary employer of city residents, not the city. This will be healthier for the city -- in the long run. But we don't get the luxury of waiting for the private sector to show up before we cut the city workers. You have to cut then gain. Obviously, this is scary for many reasons.

The people who will be hurt the most are those who rely on the city for both services and employment. The people who will be hurt the least are those who rely on the city for neither of those.