Blame me — not Dave Bing — for mangling the opening words of one of Nat King Cole’s most famous choruses.
But Bing, the former NBA star and current Detroit mayor, planted the seed in my head because of his comments to Bloomberg Businessweek about the Motor City’s future:
The only way to fix this city is to deal with reality. We are not fiscally sound. Anybody who could get out is gone, for the most part. In 2000 we had more than 900,000 people. In the last census we had just over 713,000. …
… Detroit was built over time for 2 million people, and we now have an infrastructure we can’t support. We can’t service the same landscape with a third of the people. We don’t have the taxes. We can’t pay for buses all over the city. We have to reform the pensions and fix the schools. We don’t have the density in certain communities to create safety.
The biggest problem is historic. There was a time when people could go into an auto factory and get a good-paying job with minimal education. Now you need a better education and you don’t get the same pay. Yet expectations haven’t changed. We have a benefit package for public employees that’s 108 percent of their salaries. That’s totally unsustainable.
It appears Mayor Bing understands a key problem associated with public-sector pensions.
