I'm always up for people bashing on the insanity that is Chicago, and The People's Republic of Illinois. Meep does an especially good job of it. Chicago Finances Update: Other People's Money Doesn't Go Too Far, Does It? And "not good" is something of an understatement.
What happens when you promise people stuff, and then you don't fund that stuff? You end up in debt. And Chicago is facing a $1 billion deficit. That is a lot of unpaid bills.
The big problem is with pensions. Fire, Police, and Teachers. They are not very well funded. "Not very well" being an understatement. The Fire and Police pensions are funded at about 20%.
It’s always easy to say “I’ll pay you later”…. until the later comes.
Wouldn’t ya know that everybody needs the money NOW, and, well, they don’t have enough to go around. What bad “luck”.
As Meep points out, this was a deliberate choice, made over years, or decades.
10 July 2025, Washington Examiner/MSN: Chicago pension debt climbs to $36B, up 13% in five years
That is s a lot of debt for a city that is losing taxpayers.
Daley left when the fun money was gone. Rahm tried to make some changes, but left under different circumstances and without having made much dent in the pension debt. Lori Lightfoot was forced to contribute much more money to the pensions because the money was going to run out.
But the reason they hadn’t been contributing more to the pensions for all those years in the first place was they had been promising way more than they could afford.
Anyway, my guess is that Chicago will be bankrupt soon. I'm actually surprised that they haven't gone under before this.
There is info about how much they are spending on illegal aliens. That is discretionary, but it sticks to the Orange Man Bad, or something.
And then there is this bit, which is about Chicago Schools owing money to the city, and not paying it back that reminded me of a scene from a movie.
The last time I posted about Chicago finances was April 26 in this post: Chicago and Illinois Update: Salary Sweeteners, Begging for Revenue, and Pensions Pensions Pensions, where the city of Chicago was saying “Pretty please CPS, give us that pension contribution money back…” and CPS said: “No.”
That reminded me of a scene from The Watchmen. And I'll whisper, "No." That's how the pinball machine that is my mind works.
The people who run pension funds are also at fault. They promise oversized returns in double digits and consistently the actual returns are low single digits. They keep their jobs and hire consultants (with connections) which further degrade the amount of money in the fund.
ReplyDeleteIt is worse than that in Chicago. There were (if memory serves) times when the mayor's brother-in-law or cousin was given oversight of one of the pensions. It didn't turn out well. Though I may be mistaken about that... it was a long long time ago.
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