Chicago's future looks bleak, according to The Economist
Well, it finally happened.
Chicago has been a national disgrace for years. President Trump loathes us. The bond market mocks us. Businesses flee us. Rich and middle-class families abandon us. Yet, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, ad nauseam, our fearful leader tries to explain away urban collapse as “equity.”
Now our civic humiliation has made the world stage.
Chicago is officially an international disgrace.
That designation did not come from the White House. It does not come from Fox News. It did not come from a MAGA rally. It did not come from some think tank with an axe to grind. It came from the international house organ of the global elite —The Economist — which has now decreed that Chicago is no longer merely a domestic embarrassment but a global cautionary tale.
If some intrepid reporter brings this new low to Mayor 6.6’s gnat-like attention, his first reaction will be the usual pathetic accusation of racism. Then he may say “Who cares what some newspaper in London thinks?” That’s how an economic illiterate like him reacts to such withering criticism, because he is incapable of comprehending:
- The devastating impact of this sort of terrible press;
- The wrath of the bond vigilantes like liberal doyen George Soros. (One can be assured the two-faced Soros and son won’t be there to catch BJ while he’s falling);
- The existential threat of making Chicago a no-go zone among international CEOs.
Oh, but he will, because he and the idiots and maniacs who elected him over Paul Vallas are about to get an education at their expense — and yours.
Because the elite of the international press don’t write devastating critiques like this for fun.
They send signals.
And the signal just sent about Chicago is brutal:
The bills are coming due and the adults aren’t in the room.
Welcome to property tax hell
The immediate reason The Economist turned its wrath on Chicago was that starting November 14, Cook County began mailing 1.8 million property tax reassessments —and the average residential bill jumped 17 percent in a single year.
Seventeen percent.
In a town where incomes aren’t rising.
In a town that bleeds population.
In a town whose Democrat mismanagers blame the President for the alleged affordability crisis.
In a country where the official U.S. annualized inflation rate is three percent.
Chicago homeowners just got throttled by the tax man — and here’s the worst part: according to The Economist, this is just the beginning.
No, this wasn’t merely a traditional tax hike. This was something more devastating and more revealing: the first full recalculation of real estate values after the COVID shock, a permanent structural shift in the tax base that heralds an irreversible death spiral absent radical political revolution.
Downtown office buildings? They’re empty. Their values have plummeted, and because property taxes target a total revenue amount, taxes didn’t go away — the County played the cost-shifting card, from empty commercial towers to homeowners with mortgages.
That’s how the new socialist Chicago works (or, better said, doesn’t work):
When the Neo-Woke-machine can’t get blood from a stone, it bleeds the living.
The Fiscal Apocalypse We’ve Been Pretending Isn’t Happening
Chicago is staring into a $1.2 billion — with a "B" — budget hole this year alone.
That’s not hyperbole.
That’s not ideology.
That’s arithmetic.
That gaping hole equals 20 percent of the city’s entire operating budget, and the cause is simple to see: The federal pandemic money that masked Chicago’s structural rot is gone. The morphine has worn off. Now the pain is real.
By law, Chicago must pass a “balanced” budget, except that in Chicago, balance is accomplished the same way drunks “balance” their checkbooks — by pretending tomorrow doesn’t exist, and Mayor 6.6 is determined to preserve the fantasy.
He refuses to cut spending.
He refuses to trim city bureaucracy.
He refuses to restrain labor.
He refuses to confront pensions.
He’s having another drink of the toxic progressive brew once lamented by John Kass: hopium.
If we keep going down this road to ruin, the interest rates we pay to any lender foolish enough to buy our shaky debt will match his approval rating.
The mayor refuses to challenge the two-headed hydra that is eating the city alive: Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the latter headed by Stacy "the Notorious SDG" Davis-Gates, who, as a perverse reward the malfeasance that has bankrupted our city, just got appointed as head dominatrix of the whole state teacher’s union cabal. This will put our poor excuse for a “governor," JB ”Jelly Belly” Pritzker, on his hands and knees, under the stiletto heels of her high-top leather boots.
Rather than doing the right thing, Mayor 6.6 wants to tax whatever still has a pulse.
The Brandon Johnson solution: Tax jobs
Mayor 6.6’s cure for Chicago’s terminal fiscal illness: a resuscitated “head tax” — a $21-per-employee monthly charge on companies employing more than 100 workers.
Not profits.
Not revenue.
Employees.
In other words: You get taxed for the crime of employment.
This head tax is one only a head case could love, Mayor Panic Attack is surely that.
Johnson also wants to significantly expand taxes on business services, including software — taxes mostly paid by businesses, giving these cash cows yet another reason to graze elsewhere, providing the precious milk of their tax dollars to those who wisely view them as dairy rather than dinner. This is in addition to the fact that Mayor 6% deplores successful executives as policy failures, and fiddles while their employees are burned alive and assassinated with bullets and 2x4s on their daily commutes. Could that be why people prefer to work from the friendly confines of their remote suburban homes, leaving Chicago businesses without customers and public transportation without passengers?
The “mayor” framed his war on taxpaying businesses as an act of social justice: “Large corporations and the ultra-wealthy must chip in more,” he said, sanctimoniously.
Except here’s the awful truth: Corporations don’t pay taxes.
Customers do.
Employees do.
Cities do — through lost investment.
Every mayor who’s ever said “just tax the rich” eventually ends up taxing the poor — because capital does not bleed; it flees.
Everybody hates Brandon — even Democrat politicians
In Chicago’s golden age, mayors ruled by commanding respect. Budgets passed unanimously under the Daleys.
Brandon Johnson isn’t respected. He’s rejected.
He isn’t feared. He’s jeered.
He isn’t admired. He’s reviled.
He isn’t obeyed. He obeys his dominatrix, the notorious SDG.
He isn’t loved (except by the self-flagellating, antiracist, anarchist masochists who elected him). He is loathed. Despised. Hated.
He’s in so far over his head, so far underwater with the civic fisc, he can’t even see the sunlight at noon from the deepest depths of the fiscal lake that’s drowning him —and us with him.
On November 17, the City Council, composed entirely of Democrats or even more odious Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) crushed his tax proposals 25-10.
Not quietly.
Not politely.
Emphatically.
It was an in-your-face moment.
Alderman Bill Conway — representing downtown, the city’s last economic outpost, which is suffering under existential siege — said the quiet part out loud: Raising taxes sends a “terrible signal” to job creators, not to mention creditors.
And he’s right.
Chicago is already known worldwide for crime, dysfunction, and corruption.
The Johnson administration is adding:
“Unserious.”
“Unstable.”
“Punitive.”
Three qualities investors abhor.
This guy not only can’t count money; he can’t count votes. He is committing political as well as fiscal malpractice — socialist suicide.
He will be forever known thusly:
Worst. Mayor. Ever: Thanks to the woke joke votes of folks who either aren’t from around here and those who vote for the color of skin vs. the content of character.
The bond market is flashing red
The Economist pointed out something that should terrify every Chicago taxpayer.
A recent Chicago bond refinancing attempt failed to attract all the buyers it expected.
It came up $75 million short, meaning the underwriters had to eat their own cooking, and they choked on it. They may not be back for a second helping. If we can’t roll over our unsustainable debt, the party’s over. Default, then bankruptcy, will ensue. Game, set, match. Chicago? Put a fork in it. It’s dead, gone, dead.
Perhaps worse, the bonds that did sell cost the city so a higher interest rate than unsecured New York City debt — despite ours being secured by tax revenue, albeit of dubious provenance.
That’s the global investor saying: “We trust Chicago less than we trust New York City, which just elected a communist, Jew- hating, terrorist-loving madman as mayor.”
When bond yields rise, cities die — slowly, then all at once.
Interest costs spike.
Essential services collapse.
The exodus of citizens and capital commences at full throttle. The ship of state is abandoned. It is sunk.
Chicago already spends 40 percent of its budget on debt and pensions.
Forty.
That’s not a city that works. That’s another Detroit. In fact, Detroit is now an aspirational goal.
The Second City is out of second chances
Chicago once sold its parking meters to balance its budget. Then it sold its Skyway.
It worked — once.
There are no assets left to pawn.
No rabbits — in fact, not even any hats.
This city is living on borrowed time.
The end is nigh.
And now the entire world sees it.
Chicago — A charter member of the league of broken, broke blue cities
The Economist didn’t stop with Chicago. It warned that what’s happening here is a harbinger for the rest of the league of broken blue cities.
New York City is flirting with the same path.
Los Angeles is choking on union debt.
Big cities everywhere are adding promises without subtracting liabilities, writing checks they can’t cash to buy votes, running out of the OPiuM (other people’s money) to which they’ve become addicted. As the great Prime Minister of The Economist’s home country, Margaret Thatcher, famously said, “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Eventually is now.
Chicago is ahead of the curve.
We’re reaping that which was sewn by the brain-dead progressive political predilections of imbecilic voters who:
- Succumb to the siren song of socialism;
- Feel rather than think in the ballot box;
- Take the race bait hook, line, and sinker;
- Have been driven mad by the woke mind virus.
Their remedial education in public finance is about to begin in earnest.
Now class, open your books to Chapter 9, as in bankruptcy, and your eyes to the catastrophe you’ve created.
Once upon a time, chicago built America
Oh lo, how the mighty has fallen.
This city once built railroads.
We once built skyscrapers.
We were the city of big shoulders. Now, we cry on other people’s shoulders while we spend other people’s money. Now we are the city of arsonists, of rapists, obstructors of justice, rogues, thieves, and knaves, famed no longer for our architecture, agriculture, industry, and commerce, but rather infamous for crime, poverty, stupidity, licentiousness, and corruption.
We’ve been run into the ground by communists who believe capitalists and cops are criminals, and sinners are saints; instead of playing the hero, we play the victim.
Where once we were a profile in courage, now we are a canticle of cowardice too oblivious to even feel the shame that our sad state should summon.
We elected a man whose entire résumé was grievance.
Now we live with his innumeracy, economic illiteracy, and incompetence; with his moral degradation and racism.
The disgraceful degeneration of a once great city
First, Chicago became a local disgrace.
Then a statewide scandal.
Then a national nightmare.
Now, we’re a global pariah.
Yet still, some will say:
“That’s racist.”
“It’s conservative propaganda.”
“It’s Fox News hysteria, faux news.”
No.
That’s The Economist, the internationally respected newspaper of record for the global financial and political elite, that has delivered the grim prognosis that Woke America didn’t dare to make.
One last question for Chicago voters
How much evidence do you need?
You voted your feelings instead of your finances.
For slogans instead of solvency.
For symbolism instead of safety.
And this is what you got.
At some point, voters have to accept responsibility.
At some point, denial becomes collaboration.
At some point, silence for fear of cancellation becomes complicity.
That point is here and now.
The madness must stop. The mutiny must begin.
The clock is ticking toward 2027
Chicago doesn’t need another socialist CTU sycophant.
It needs a turnaround expert — a competent pragmatist with the spine of a Marine.
Someone with the courage to say:
“No. Enough is enough. No more giveaways. No more illusions. No more lies. No more race-grifting. No more ACAB. No more criminal coddling.”
Someone like Paul Vallas, whom the voters foolishly rejected. A man on horseback to rescue us from the folly that is about to consume us.
When and if that secular savior emerges, the Neo-machine will do its best to destroy him.
If the voters fail to face reality and embrace him, the city’s fate is sealed in a socialist sarcophagus
It won’t just be another Detroit. It will be another Harvey. Another Gary. A charred hulk of its former self.
Chicago was once America’s commercial heartland.
Today it’s in financial hospice.
And now, the whole world is watching it die.
