A Salute to Troy

By Troy, I'm referring to Troy, Michigan, a city that lies in the shadows of a crumbling Detroit and a city, it would seem, with at least a little bit of common sense and a sense of responsibility.

Troy has figured something out. It has determined that the most destitute country in the history of the solar system does not have the money to spend on a project whose benefits were over-hyped, was not needed, and despite the fact that the $8 million necessary to construct the albatross was coming from the feds, was not free.

The people in Troy have discovered something that should make them eligible to win next year's Nobel Prize for Economics--namely that federal tax dollars still are paid by those who live in small, medium, and large towns across America; they are not created arbitrarily at the wave of some federal bureaucrat's wand.

This country is $15 trillion in debt not counting the scores of trillions of additional debt currently off the books in the form of unfunded liabilities. Not only does this country not have the money to fund wanted but unnecessary building projects, it doesn't even have the money to fund initiatives without which needy people will go hungry, without heat, and without health care.

Troy is but one declining city in one declining state in what amounts to a bankrupt country, and as it turns its nose up at this project, countless other entities across the nation are greedily peeping toward the sky hoping the shadow of Father Bird Obama will regurgitate some borrowed Chinese money down their gluttonous throats for their own versions of a pet project--easily wiping out Troy's common sense on the order of a thousand times or so.

But for this moment at least, we should salute Troy.