....I mean chain of events type of things not just "Duurrrr Democrats". I mean what happened there over the last 20 or 30 years that brings it to its current state? I really want to know.
This is what happens when politicians kick everything down the road rather than make tough decisions that are unpopular when they needed to be made. Pensions should have been done away with or scaled back, etc all along the way for example. There is a long string of thought in American culture that leadership is about expanding, growing, building new things. When doing financial planning, they just assume growth will happen. When it doesn't, politicians largely are lost at what to do other than blame someone else, defer hard choices for someone else to make, and generally engage in a pattern of subterfuge. We don't have a lot of leadership experience or training or even knowledge yet about how to effectively scale down in government. In a generation, we should have a plethora of experts, scars and all.
It's really hard for me to see how cutting the incomes of a city's most vulnerable middle-class citizens would help things. Talk about a drop in the bucket. This could be a symptom, but not a cause.
Pension plans are breaking the backs of local governments. Government employees are hardly the most vulnerable part of the middle class. If you have less revenue, growing expenses, and pension plans are massively underfunded because of the poor market returns, then it is better to cut pensions than it is to cut fire fighters. The government's job is to provide services, not pay people to not do anything.