Detroit stands as an extreme example of how an Obama tax system of “spreading the wealth” (actually, confiscating it) inevitably means that since there is not enough rich and business people’s money to create a utopia of income equality — government must inevitably tax middle income people, too.

Worse, most of the money ends up in government’s coffers where it gets misspent and siphoned to special interests—instead of in the pockets of citizens whose spending and investing stimulates economic and job growth.

Here’s how that works: Insure that unions and government workers get generous pension, health and other benefit packages that government can’t fund, long-term, in exchange for their votes and political activism.

According to the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, “Fully 99.6% of [Detroit’s] retiree health-care liabilities are unfunded” and…“unfunded obligations account for $9.2 billion of Detroit’s $18 billion debt.”