former republican governor of michigan, john engler and jared bernstein. i think hearing from kevin orr, he isn't shuf if all of those 100,000 creditors are going to be paid. governor engler, let meet get your thoughts on that. how complicated this is and this city that means so much to you, what do you think the chances are that detroit will emerge strong? how difficult is this going to be? >> there is a lot of strength that is left in detroit that still there. the investments that dan gilbert has been making. the river front. those are important. there are a number of other companies and investments that are there. i think you have to look at detroit and say what can we be going forward once we have shed this debt and how do we organize ourselves in way there is tremendous value? whether that is a massive enterprise zone concept, some way to look ahead. there's tremendous value still to be found in detroit. but kevyn orr is smart in the way he has approached this because he has looked at public safety. no question without public safety, nobody will be in

. >> earlier today we heard former governor john engler call this detroit's katrina. i was in new orleans before katrina and i'm still there now. it took me a long time to commit to moving full time to that city because it was on the same inexorable sort of slide, slap into the river that detroit is. you don't want a hurricane of massive proportion to wreck a city but you learn to take your silver linings where you can. this can be a real catalyst for detroit. we had no business -- at least they've still got some -- they've got major industry still there. we had nothing but like -- literally the only economic base in new orleans was tourism. so now we have all these entrepreneurs. we have something called -- i'm sure melissa is familiar with -- called idea village where these guys come to new orleans and give seed money to entrepreneurs which we never had -- no entrepreneurial spirit in new orleans before katrina. you need those kind of people to come and use detroit as a lab. because it is not the only city on the verge of bankruptcy is the other thing. you need bril

this is former michigan governor john engler. he is republican. he was a governor. he had power. do you know what he did? he made a lot of bad decisions and he had underhanded negotiations which played a major role in detroit's bankruptcy filing. let me take you back to 1998 when promises were made. he said he was going to give detroit $300 million annually of state funds for nine years if detroit promised to bring down its tax rates. which they did. this happened until detroit's economy suffered a downturn in 2002. the city got far less than what it was promised from the republican governor. and it still capitouldn't raise taxes because they were handcuffed in that manner. one calculation came forward and said that the city lost revenue. they starved the city of detroit. denying revenue sharing. snyder also withheld state funds from the city. bottom line, republican tax policy and tax breaks added to the destruction of this american city financially. 19 while, republicans have also been attacking the ed show because we labeled detroit a conservative utopia. well, oddly enough, r