Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel yesterday unveiled his proposed
fiscal 2014 budget, a document that his trained circus seals in the City Council
will doubtless overwhelmingly pass while taking the time to lick the Mayor’s
boots in the process. The budget
proposes no increases in property, sales, or gasoline taxes. However, the Mayor is counting on raising
$130 mm from “enhanced” traffic and parking fines and $10 mm from an increase
in the cigaret tax.
If one stretched and craned and denied reality sufficiently,
one could almost say that this isn’t a bad budget; there is no increase in the
most politically charged, for good reason, taxes and yet the city raises $140
mm in badly needed money to help balance the budget. However, such an observation would be wrong
on at least one count. All that added
revenue from the red light cameras, the speeding cameras, the higher fines for
parking where the Mayor doesn’t want you to park, etc., will not go toward
balancing the budget. No, the Mayor and
his henchmen plan to spend that money on such feel good programs as summer
jobs, children’s health and vision programs, cultural programming in neighborhood
parks, tree-trimming, rodent control (in City Hall, perhaps? But I digress.), graffiti removal, and other
such vague yet anodyne pursuits.
One wonders how the city of Chicago
will ever balance its budget on a sustainable basis, and begin to address the
date with bankruptcy its long term budget “problems” promise, if the Mayor and
his lackeys who shamelessly call themselves a legislative body always manage to
spend whatever additional revenue they manage to raise. Perhaps there is no need to wonder; the
answer is that Chicago will never
balance its budget on a sustainable basis and will never address its budget
problems.
The Mayor has a ready answer for such objections. He is indeed going to address Chicago ’s
leak-ridden long term financial superstructure, yes sir. He is going to do so through “economic growth
and revenue enhancement” from an improving economy, cost reductions that
involve no lay-offs, and “improved fiscal management.” Talk about boldly facing one’s problems with
concrete proposals!
One suspects that the only reason Mr. Emanuel hasn’t come up
with a plan for spending the savings and revenue generated by the
aforementioned maneuvers is that he, too, being nobody’s fool, realizes how phony
baloney, pie-in-the-sky, I’ll gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today
such piffles are.
At the same time, one of Super Rohm’s water carriers, Senate
President John Cullerton, is telling us that the state of Illinois
has no pension crisis. As long as we
keep our business and personal income tax rates at their “temporary” elevated levels,
everything will be fine, this financial Einstein reassures us.
Let’s stipulate that nobody ever thought there was anything
remotely temporary about the recent 60% increase in the Illinois personal income tax and the similar increase
in business taxes that accompanied it. So
Mr. Cullerton is not telling us anything we didn’t know about the income
tax. He also is proposing very little,
if anything, to reform pensions. The
problem is, though, that, even with taxes at these extortionate levels, we will
still have an enormous pension hole, still around $100 billion, if we do
nothing to reform public pensions in this state, despite what Mr. Cullerton
seems to believe, or at least is pretending to believe.
The only thing that Mr. Cullerton is achieving by denying
the existence of a pension crisis as long as we keep taxes at their current
level is betraying an attitude, misguided as it may be, that is by no means
unique to him, to wit…as long as those poor suckers who work in this state
continue to pay through the nose, the politicians can continue to buy votes
with the money the saps fork over. Mr.
Cullerton, having made his living in politics, sees nothing wrong with such a
situation; indeed, having the people of Illinois finance the exercises in self-aggrandizement
he and his cohorts call careers is the political equivalent of valhalla and he thus
obviously sees no reason to change it.
Why should he? It works nicely
for Mr. Cullerton…and we continue to elect his ilk, and usually with great
enthusiasm.
The shenanigans and attitudes of the likes of Rahm Emanuel
and John Cullerton, combined with their enormous success at the polls, cause
yours truly to do things. First, I quote
a man who is something of an idol to me, H.L. Mencken, and I do so twice:
“Democracy is the
theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good
and hard.”
And
“Government is a
broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of
stolen goods.”
Second, I continue to pursue plausible avenues of escape
from the Land of Lincoln
See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of
Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge,
A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on
how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.
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