Will the last one to leave Detroit please turn out the lights?

The Detroit News: Detroit's population falls 25%, Bing wants recount

Of course he does. The Detroit power base is slipping away due to years of corruption, incompetence and mismanagement. Poor Mayor Bing is stuck trying to pick up the pieces of a city his predecessors have run into the ground.

According to the Census, Detroit just dropped below 720,000 people. It now has less than half of its population in its heyday of 1.5 million.

Mayor Bing wants a recount so he doesn't lose funding, City Council President Charles Pugh wants all the felons in jail around the state that were born in Detroit counted as part of the city's population.

Seriously, he said it and he wants it.

One would think your exported felons wouldn't be something to be proud of, but what can you do when you have to scrape up every soul to keep the money coming in?

The loss in population will also require a multitude of Michigan's laws that are geared to only allow Detroit to do certain things such as having casinos and a 3% income tax and an electricity tax, to be rewritten.

For now the laws are based on a population of 750,000 for the taxes and 800,000 for the casinos, and now that Detroit has dropped below those numbers it can't qualify. You can't make laws in Michigan to single out a city by name as that would be discriminating, only population, which has the same effect if you write it so that only a single city has the desired population.

But Detroit lost so much population, they're going to have to start creative gerrymandering to maintain the two minority race-based Congressional districts based out of Detroit as under federal law you can't dilute minority strength even in the face of demographic reality: Detroit districts to reach into suburbs for blacks.

Anybody else find that quite creepy, not to mention rather racist?

Detroit is sadly the prime example in the USA of how you can destroy a once proud city and drag down an entire metropolitan area with it.