> If a city is going to go bankrupt, it will be because of pension and healthcare costs and not infrastructure maintenance costs. If all else fails infrastructu

> If a city is going to go bankrupt, it will be because of pension and healthcare costs and not infrastructure maintenance costs. If all else fails infrastructure can be abandoned but pensions and health plans will be politically untouchable, and in some places they are legally untouchable. There are two issues here: bankruptcy, which is a crappy legal and financial situation to be in, and which you may or may not avoid, and city decline, which can happen even if you avoid bankruptcy. Leaving swaths of the city to rot is the latter, and does not strike me as necessarily better (and certainly not for the residents of those swaths). Moreover, the infrastructure problems compound any issues with pensions, since if people leave, it will be harder to have the tax base to fulfill previous obligations. Saying that the last expenditure left standing in a financial Armageddon was the one that “did them in” sounds like an oversimplification.