From Du Sable to “Mayor 6.6” and the “Notorious SDG,” we’re coming up on the end of the fiscal road
When the first settler, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, set up his trading post on the banks of the Chicago River, he had one priceless advantage:
No pensioners!
He didn’t need to worry about actuarial tables, COLA increases, or unfunded liabilities. He was free to trade, grow, and prosper without yesterday’s promises weighing him down, and he got the most beautiful road in the world named after him, albeit a little clunkily.
Fast forward to 2025. We now have Brandon “Mayor 6.6” Johnson, whose every move is shackled by that five-letter curse word: M-O-N-E-Y. He doesn’t have enough of it. But his closest political ally, CTU president Stacy Davis Gates (”The Notorious SDG,”) who always reminds us of the razor-toting Dorothy “The schools suck” Tillman, always wants more. and more, and more—for sure! No ifs, ands, or buts.
Where do they find it? By borrowing, of course! Chicago’s banks, knowing the taxpayers will always cover the bill, are always WAY too eager to lend, and they’ll charge stiff interest for the privilege.
So you shouldn’t borrow unless you really need to, which is why we have a new school superintendent, and a new school board.
The scorecard nobody can read
The latest standoff inside Chicago Public Schools shows how tangled this game has become. On one side you have the CPS finance people — interim CEO Macquline King, Chief Budget Officer Mike Sitkowski, and others — who say: “Don’t borrow when we already have money.”
On the other side, you have Johnson, SDG, and their “brain bust”, who insist that CPS must borrow anyway, just in case. In case what? In case TIF revenues don’t come in.
TIF: Harold’s legacy hijacked
Here’s the backdrop. In the 1980s, Mayor Harold Washington authorized Chicago’s tax increment financing (TIF) system. The idea was straightforward: create an incentive for redevelopment in struggling neighborhoods. Freeze the base property tax, capture the increment as values rise, and reinvest it in local projects.
But there was a catch: neighborhoods like Englewood and Woodlawn didn’t have any taxable increment to capture. Poor areas couldn’t generate new revenues from thin air. Developers and aldermen quickly hijacked the system and turned it into a slush fund for downtown mega-projects — places that hardly needed a subsidy in the first place.
Now, 40 years later, we’ve got $3.4 billion sitting in TIF funds. Money collected, stashed, and rarely returned to taxpayers. Washington may have meant TIF as a lifeline for the neighborhoods. Instead, it became a gold mine for developers, lawyers, and political fixers — many of whom are now wearing orange jumpsuits.
The big lie about risk
Today, CPS is counting on about $379 million in TIF surplus to balance its budget. That’s more than last year’s record surplus, and it’s money the district is entitled to by law. How many times has the City failed to deliver? Zero.
Yet Mayor 6.6 and SDG insist: “Better safe than sorry, let’s borrow instead.” They’d rather pay banks interest than trust a revenue stream that has never defaulted. It’s like taking out a payday loan when you’ve already got cash in the bank!
Meanwhile, CPS is laying off custodians, crossing guards, lunch staff, and paraprofessionals and the mayor’s solution is to saddle the district with more debt service instead of simply using the money already on the table.
A city on the road to nowhere
Chicago isn’t technically bankrupt. Not yet. It’s just that its nearly $50 billion in pension debt won’t be paid off until sometime after the Second Coming.
Every time the city borrows instead of using cash on hand, it accelerates the slide.
Former CEO Pedro Martinez understood this — and it cost him his job. He said "no" to Johnson’s pension-shifting shell game, and City Hall tossed him overboard. Now King and Sitkowski are holding the same line, and Johnson is trying to bulldoze them into submission. He can’t even get his stooges to dance to his tune. That’s the worst thing in Chicago politics: powerlessness.
The bottom line
The math isn’t complicated. Don’t borrow if you don’t have to. Don’t pay interest when you already have cash. Don’t let your mayor spin fairy tales about “ifs” and “maybes” while the real money sits untouched in TIF accounts.
Even some aldermen — including a few of the Democratic Socialists — get it: borrowing when you’ve already got billions set aside is just plain stupid.
Now, when a Democratic Socialist tells you something is stupid you have to respect it because there is nothing stupider on God‘s green earth than a Democratic Socialist (other than their voters of course) except an outright communist, and it’s tough to tell the difference between the two (something to do with hammers and sickles, I think).
But little cares Mayor 6.6 for math — with polls like that, you can’t afford to! Johnson doesn’t govern by math. He governs by whatever whims the Notorious SDG whispers in his ear.
And that’s why Chicago has a mayor who looks dumber by the day, a school system whose janitors have more sense than The Man on Five, and a financial future that looks more like Detroit’s with every passing budget.
The first settler, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, had no pensioners. Brandon Johnson has nothing but. That’s the difference between a founder and a flounder.
His approval ratings and city finances are so far underwater, the only thing they’re going to name after him is the Deep Tunnel, so everybody can curse him when their basements flood.
