Detroit, Obamacare, and Unexpected Consequences

It is big businesses that are the socialist. Relevant to this thread the city says it doesn’t have the money to pay citizens their earned health care benefits, but that it does have almost a half a billion dollars to spend on an sports stadium that will benefit will benefit a wealthy sports franchise owner.

Bulldoze the blight and turn huge swaths of Detroit into self-reliant agrarian communal enclaves. Let them grow potatoes. We'll see how that goes.

Thanks for understanding my point. We're not in total agreement, but I'd hope you'd agree that we're both within the range of reasonable on this.

My main point is to put the lie to the notion that if something has socialist qualities, that it is by definition anti-American and bad. Because many of the best features of our great society have socialist qualities, including some of the ones I listed.

Unfortunately, it is the rural areas of our country that are the most costly and dangerous.

I say costly because it really is the rural areas of our country that suck the government teat to the greatest degree, with all their farm subsidies, federally subsidized rural electrification and so on. Or as Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie helpfully pointed out the other day, "New Jersey gets back 61 cents for every dollar sent to Washington while Kentucky receives $1.51. Maybe he [Senator Rand Paul] should start cutting the pork barrel spending that he brings home to Kentucky but I doubt he will."

I say dangerous because the chances of dying do to unintentional injury, from car accidents, homicide, drugs, and so on, are 20% HIGHER in rural areas as compared with urban areas.

So it turns out that if our friend DonDiego and kin are really interested in avoiding an early demise, they would do well to move away from their country estate and to a much safer location. Like Chicago.

What a delightful surprise....a civilized (mostly) debate on a very important subject...As examples, kudos to Chil and fork for they're usual intelligent responses...and I must say, pj is impressing me with his thoughtful comments..refreshing and very welcome!

This study measures all urban areas vs all rural areas which distorts the numbers There are urban neighborhoods where homicide/drug deaths are non-existent (upper east side of Manhattan) while those deaths are significantly higher in parts of Brooklyn.

So another flawed forky stat

You have to factor in neighborhoods. Some urban neighborhoods have high homicide rates while others have very low rates.

Upper east side of Manhattan or Staten Island are very safe, while neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Harlem and the south Bronx are dangerous. Lumping them all together creates a distortion

So when we want to understand the overall urban crime situation, we should not include the safer urban areas in our analysis? Huh?

Kind of like analyzing chocolate chip ice cream without factoring in the chocolate chips.

Acutally, lumping them all together creates an "average." Or a "mean" if you really know what the hell you are talking about.

And homicides? The number one driver of injury death in cities and especially in the sticks, is vehicle accidents - I think by about a 15:1 ratio.