As Chris Edwards point out here, Detroit has for years had the highest property taxes of any large American city. The statist politicians in charge squeezed all they could out of the private sector so they would have the money to spend on all the stuff they liked: high pensions for union workers, the “People Mover,” huge expenditures by the mayor and his cronies, etc.

Obama famously derided business owners by saying “You didn’t build that.” Would he similarly say to the politicians who ran Detroit into the ground, “You didn’t wreck that”? I think so.