On Topic: Why we should care about Detroit in Iowa

George Erickcek, a friend of mine who's an economist in Michigan, used to tell a cautionary fable that goes like this:

Let's say you're the mayor of Flint, Mich., in the 1930s, and the devil comes calling. And he offers you a deal - 50 years of booming employment.

After that, well, then you're on your own.

What would you do, George would ask … even though we all know the only possible answer.

In case you aren't up on your auto industry history, Flint, some 66 miles northwest of Detroit, became the poster child of the feast and famine years of car manufacturing in America. Its big sit-down strike in 1936 helped lead to the formation of the United Auto Workers, and by 1960 about 200,000 residents called that city home.

But after that, wow, did things go bad - car sales declined; domestic carmakers sliced production and jobs; crime and poverty rose; services were trimmed; people packed up and moved out. Infrastructure began to crumble.

The 1973 Arab oil embargo, with its rationing and long queues at the gas pumps, only made difficult times seem much worse for a car-centric city.

By the 1980s, the shadows cast by all those scary omens grew even longer. Jobs through the generations at the car plant? What jobs?

The 2010 census reported only 102,000 folk living in Flint - almost half the number from 1960.

The critical message is that what happened to Flint and to Detroit, and the debt-mounting troubles that befell other metro areas all across the nation - 35 U.S. municipalities so far, from burly Stockton, Calif., to little Central Falls, R.I., have filed for bankruptcy - can happen elsewhere, too, even if they don't make to bankruptcy court. (Flint's emergency manager stated in July that his city likely won't go bankrupt, but officials there did give it some thought.)

Ah, poor Detroit, with its monstrous $18 billion debt. Bad attitude, bad management - and not just in the C suites of General Motors and Chrysler: Its one-time mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, will be sentenced come September on corruption charges that could send him to jail for more than a couple decades.

Alan Mallach, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, told Bloomberg News, that declining tax revenues, pension obligations, too much borrowing and other maladies affect “dozens, if not hundreds, of cities.”

Oh, I know what you're thinking: Why should we care here in Eastern Iowa about what happens to those sooty industrialized cities? We're clean and safe.

After all, for one of the scariest harbingers, pension funding gaps, Iowa ranks near the bottom of all states (in terms of percentage of state revenues for 2012), according to Moody's - at No. 47, with a modest 16 percent.

But we have no official policy when comes to what we as a nation should do to help cities - just as we had no agreed-upon tactic for aiding our auto industry or big banks. When asked what the White House could do by way of throwing Detroit a lifeline, Vice President Biden replied, “We don't know.”

So there's this: Charlie LeDuff, author of “Detroit: An American Autopsy,” wondered in the New York Times two weeks ago about who ultimately is going to ante up for those unemployment checks of the fired workers that all these cities can no longer sustain. What about their health-care claims?

And you know the answer to that, right?