Garbage in the 5th floor, garbage out the budget outbox
When the Washington Post declares your budget process — and, by implication, you — to be a joke, adding to a chorus of press that view our sad excuse for a mayor as a laughing stock, that ought to prompt a moment of self-reflection. A pause. Maybe even a rethink.
But not if you’re Mayor Brandon Johnson, better known around these parts as Mayor 6.6.
Asked recently about the Post’s dismissive take on Chicago’s latest fiscal clown show, Johnson waved it away. They don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s the reflex. That’s always the reflex. Anyone who criticizes this administration simply “doesn’t get it.” Everyone else is wrong. The mayor is right. Reality is a stranger to Himself.
Unfortunately for Chicago, the Post knows exactly what it’s talking about. And now the Chicago Tribune — no conservative bastion these days — has effectively confirmed it.
After a marathon City Council Finance Committee session that looked more like sausage-making than governance, the Tribune’s editorial board delivered a verdict that can best be summarized as this: the budget is probably going to pass, but the whole process is still garbage.
They’re right.
A council revolt — and a mayor who caused it
What made this moment remarkable, as the Tribune notes, is not that the budget is messy — Chicago budgets always are — but that for the first time in living memory, a city council openly wrested control of the budget away from a sitting mayor.
That doesn’t happen in this town.
It happened because Johnson’s administration is relentlessly ideological, economically unserious, and hostile to the basic idea that Chicago exists in a competitive national marketplace. His obsession with reviving the corporate head tax — a monthly levy on jobs — was a bridge too far, even for Democrats who normally fall in line.
So the council revolted.
Led by Aldermen Scott Waguespack and Nicole Lee, and shepherded through committee by Pat Dowell, the council produced an alternative revenue package designed not to save Chicago, but to prevent immediate self-immolation. The head tax — Johnson’s class-warfare fetish — was killed. A proposed garbage fee increase was scrapped to placate demagogues. A few concessions were tossed the mayor’s way, including more funding for summer teen jobs.
This wasn’t courage. It was triage.
Why this is still a garbage budget
The Tribune is refreshingly candid about what’s wrong.
First, the garbage fee. Chicago’s trash collection is massively subsidized, far below peer cities, and doesn’t come close to covering its costs. Apartment dwellers already pay for private collection and subsidize single-family homeowners through their taxes and rent. That’s regressive by any honest definition.
Raising the fee would have made sense. The politics killed it.
Instead, the council opened the door to expanded video gambling in neighborhood bars — a policy that will hit working- and middle-class Chicagoans far harder than the tourists Bally’s casino is supposed to fleece. That’s not reform. That’s desperation.
Then there’s the debt.
Despite some trimming, the Finance Committee still approved the lion’s share of a record $2.8 billion in new bonding authority — including debt to cover back pay, legal settlements for police misconduct, and future capital projects, even though the city is already sitting on $2.4 billion in unused bond authority.
This is how cities quietly die: refinancing today, borrowing tomorrow, pretending the bill will never come due.
Credit agencies are watching. Fitch has already warned that Chicago’s brinksmanship is “uncharacteristic” — which, in bond-market English, means dangerously stupid.
Businesses continue to get the shaft
The Tribune also notes — approvingly, for reasons that baffle us — 84 percent of the new tax and fee burden falls on businesses, with residents absorbing just 16 percent.
That’s supposed to be comforting.
It shouldn’t be.
Businesses are the lifeblood of this city. They are already fleeing — not because they’re greedy, but because Chicago treats them like ATMs that can be smashed whenever progressive math doesn’t add up. Knocking down the head tax was necessary. It was also the bare minimum.
This budget remains hostile to investment, allergic to growth, and addicted to debt
Mayor 6.6 should take the deal — and get out of the way
The Tribune urges Johnson not to veto the council’s budget. On that narrow point, they’re absolutely right.
Chicago must have a budget. A shutdown looms if something doesn’t pass. And unlike councils of the past, this one is angry, motivated, and done playing along — even though they nominally share the mayor’s party label.
Johnson would be well advised not to test them.
In his brief and unhappy tenure, he has accomplished almost nothing of value, with one notable exception: appointing the current police chief. Beyond that, his administration has been a masterclass in ideological rigidity, fiscal recklessness, and tone-deaf governance.
If he vetoes this deal, he won’t look principled. He’ll look petulant.
The bigger picture: Change the guard
This episode is just another reminder that Chicago cannot survive on woke slogans, suicide-by-empathy, and debt-financed fantasies.
Mayor 6.6 is a problem. But he’s not the only one.
Boss Preckwinkle. Governor J.B. Pritzker. And looming over it all, the real power broker in this city — Stacey Davis Gates, now angling to extend her reach from Chicago into state politics.
If you’ve chosen to stick it out in this city — to raise a family here, run a business here, or simply refuse to surrender it — then the task ahead is obvious.
Change the guard.
That fight doesn’t end this year. But it starts now.
Have a great holiday.
Rest up.
And we’ll get them next year.
