Brandon Johnson wants four more years. Chicago might want to examine what he did in his first four
In the least surprising news of the year, the notorious MBJ has announced that he is running for reelection.
Yes, Mayor Brandon Johnson wants four more years.
Apparently, the job isn’t finished.
Chicago has now endured two consecutive mayors, Lori Lightfoot and Brandon Johnson, during an extraordinarily difficult period in the city’s history. Walk stretches of Michigan Avenue or commercial corridors on the South and West sides and you can find enough vacancies, shuttered storefronts, and scars of disinvestment to understand why so many Chicagoans wonder what happened to the city they remember.
But Johnson’s answer is: Give me four more years.
He launched his campaign proclaiming that he is “the only candidate who’s fighting for working families” and promising a “safer and more affordable Chicago.”
Safer and more affordable? This is where satire becomes almost unnecessary. Johnson’s own campaign website provides a remarkable archaeological record of what he promised Chicago the first time around. He promised to get the city’s finances in order. He promised to stop property-tax hikes. He promised to attack the root causes of crime. He promised investments in housing, education, mental health, transportation, environmental programs, arts, guaranteed income, and an assortment of other progressive causes.
And now, after nearly four years of Brandon Johnson, Chicago faces a projected $882.4 million budget hole for 2027. That is the good news. The bad news is that the mayor who campaigned against property-tax increases won’t rule one out. Johnson says he still wants to rely instead on what he calls “progressive revenue.” There is that wonderful word again: progressive.
In ordinary English, revenue means money. In government English, revenue means taxes. And in progressive government English, “progressive revenue” means finding somebody whom politicians believe can be taxed without producing sufficient political retaliation to stop them.
Johnson’s campaign website is refreshingly candid about the philosophy. “No one should be too poor to live in one of the richest cities in the world,” it declares, before saying Johnson will “make the wealthy pay their fair share.”Fair share. Two words that have performed more political heavy lifting than a Chicago Streets and Sanitation crew. What percentage constitutes a fair share? The website doesn’t say. At what point does the fair share become an unfair share? Doesn’t say that either. And what happens when the people and businesses expected to provide that revenue decide that Indiana, Wisconsin, Florida, Tennessee, or Texas might appreciate them more?
Chicago cannot erect a wall around the city limits. Capital has feet. So do taxpayers. So do businesses. And so do families. That matters because municipal government operates under a constraint that ideological politics often prefers to ignore. Washington can run deficits on a scale unavailable to a city. Chicago has to collect money from an economic base that is capable of moving somewhere else. Raise the cost of living, owning property, operating a business, or investing here high enough and eventually some people will respond. They leave. Not everybody. Not immediately. But municipal decline doesn’t ordinarily arrive with a brass band announcing its presence. It occurs one decision at a time: one family moves, one business doesn’t renew a lease, one entrepreneur opens in a suburb instead, one homeowner decides not to buy, one employer puts the next facility somewhere else. Eventually those individual decisions become statistics.
Johnson’s original fiscal platform promised $1 billion a year in additional investments while simultaneously promising to get Chicago’s finances in order. The money would go toward housing, health, mental health, child care, education, and training, among other things. This is the governing philosophy in miniature: Chicago has enormous fiscal problems, therefore Chicago needs to spend more money. The campaign’s public-safety program follows much the same logic.
Johnson promised a “new strategy” that would attack the “root causes” of crime by investing in schools, jobs, housing, and mental health. He proposed an Office of Community Safety, more violence-prevention spending, removal of the gang database and shifting some emergency responses from armed police officers to mental-health professionals. Some of these ideas can be debated on their merits. And citywide homicide numbers have, importantly, fallen substantially from their pandemic-era peaks. That fact belongs in any fair accounting of Johnson’s record.
But improvement in a statistic is not the same thing as solving the problem. Crime is experienced by human beings, not spreadsheets. A city can record a declining homicide rate while particular neighborhoods continue to endure a level of violence that residents would never consider acceptable. Try explaining “root causes” to the owner of a business that’s been robbed. Try explaining systemic inequity to somebody whose catalytic converter disappeared overnight. Try explaining the sociology of violence to a mother whose child has been shot. At some point, government encounters an extraordinarily old-fashioned concept:
Crime has perpetrators
Poverty does not pull a trigger. Inequality does not carjack a motorist. A lack of affordable housing does not rob a convenience store. People do those things. Government can address social conditions and enforce the law simultaneously. Chicago should be capable of holding two thoughts in its municipal head at the same time.
Then there are the schools. Johnson’s campaign biography proudly identifies him as a former Chicago Teachers Union organizer. That isn’t an accusation. It’s his résumé. His education platform calls for more staffing, more librarians, more clinicians, more counselors, more arts programs, more sports, more health services, more technology and, naturally, more money. There is considerably less discussion of where all the money ultimately comes from. That omission becomes rather important when the city already faces an $882 million projected deficit and its public-school system has been wrestling with enormous financial pressures of its own.
CPS began its FY2027 budget process confronting a $732.5 million deficit. The district eventually adopted a balanced budget, but its own budget documents say CPS carries more than $9 billion in outstanding debt and spends more than $900 million annually on debt service. Think about those numbers for a moment. Before a teacher teaches a child algebra, before a librarian buys a book, before a janitor cleans a classroom, and before anybody switches on the lights, a huge portion of the district’s resources is already spoken for by obligations accumulated over the years. Chicago does not possess a magic money tree growing behind City Hall. Every dollar government spends ultimately comes from somebody: a homeowner, renter, worker, consumer, employer, investor, visitor or future taxpayer who inherits the debt. That is the part of the progressive economic equation that somehow keeps disappearing from the blackboard.
Johnson’s campaign also promises affordable housing, expanded mental-health services, greater support for immigrants and refugees, more subsidized transportation, reduced or eliminated CTA fares for some riders, municipal snow removal from sidewalks, more bike lanes, car-free zones, environmental programs and expanded guaranteed income. One can support any particular item on that list.
Indeed, many are perfectly legitimate subjects for government expenditure. The question isn’t whether mental healthcare is good, affordable housing is desirable or children should receive a decent education. Of course they are. The question government can never escape is how much, paid for by whom, and at what cost to everything else? A family understands this instinctively. So does a small business. You can want a new car, a vacation, a remodeled kitchen, and a larger retirement account simultaneously. Wanting them does not make the money appear. Government is not exempt from arithmetic merely because its intentions are benevolent. Eventually somebody has to add up the check.
And that brings us back to $882.4 million. Johnson says Chicago cannot go backward. That is a clever campaign slogan. The more useful question is: Which direction have we been going? Because Chicago isn’t an abstraction. It isn’t an ideological laboratory. It isn’t a graduate seminar in progressive public policy. It isn’t somebody’s opportunity to prove that the correct combination of taxes, subsidies, redistribution, and social programs can finally make municipal socialism work. It’s our home. This is the city of neighborhoods and churches, two-flats and bungalows, corner taverns and family businesses, cops and firefighters, tradesmen and teachers, immigrants and grandchildren of immigrants, South Siders and North Siders and West Siders who argue endlessly about everything while sharing one fundamental interest: We need Chicago to work. We need the trains to run. We need the streets passable. We need the schools to educate children. We need police to catch criminals. We need businesses to believe Chicago is worth investing in. We need homeowners to believe their houses will retain their value. We need working people to believe they can afford to remain here. And above all, we need a government capable of understanding that the people who pay for Chicago are not an inexhaustible natural resource.
That’s the great weakness in the political language of “fair share.” It treats taxpayers primarily as sources of revenue rather than participants in an ecosystem. But the taxpayer is also the employer who creates a job, the landlord who maintains a building, the customer who supports a restaurant, the homeowner who stabilizes a block, and the entrepreneur deciding whether Chicago is where the next dollar should be invested. Lose enough of them and the remaining taxpayers don’t become richer. They inherit a larger share of the bill.
Brandon Johnson has now formally asked Chicago for four more years. Before Chicago answers, perhaps we should take his campaign literature down from the shelf, place it beside his record, and perform that most radical of political acts: Read the fine print.
Remember, Johnson is a professional liar. He is bought, paid for, fully owned by the notorious SDG and the Chicago Teachers Union. Johnson is the guy they sent to take all our money and give it to them, and give us nothing in return.
This thief cannot be re-elected. He must be sent back to Elgin. There are plenty of alternatives. One will emerge as the branded Slayer. Hopefully, it won't even come down to a runoff, but if it does, that will be the end of him if we have anything to say about it. Fortunately, for the moment at least, we do.
So let us dedicate ourselves to relegating the notorious MBJ to the ash heap of history where he belongs.
