I live in Japan so I've got an obvious bias, but growing up I don't remember many Americans who went with Japanese cars because they were cheaper.
The incompetence of city government angle, though, that I can get behind. Detroit in particular is two cities. We could call them Red Detroit and Blue Detroit. The Red politicians hate Blue Detroit with a passion, because they think the Blues have money and aren't sharing enough of it with Reds (and, most particularly, Red politicians). The Blues are deathly afraid of the Reds killing them, but try to be circumspect about putting it in so many words, so rather than stay in the city and face a possibility of death and a certainty of being "the colorist bastards always keeping hardworking Blues down" they have long since left for greener pastures.
That is a metaphor, of course -- no one in Detroit is actually colored Red or Blue.
The incompetence of city government angle, though, that I can get behind. Detroit in particular is two cities. We could call them Red Detroit and Blue Detroit. The Red politicians hate Blue Detroit with a passion, because they think the Blues have money and aren't sharing enough of it with Reds (and, most particularly, Red politicians). The Blues are deathly afraid of the Reds killing them, but try to be circumspect about putting it in so many words, so rather than stay in the city and face a possibility of death and a certainty of being "the colorist bastards always keeping hardworking Blues down" they have long since left for greener pastures.
That is a metaphor, of course -- no one in Detroit is actually colored Red or Blue.