By Rex Wholster @ Shutterstock.com
If you were cooking up a metropolitan disaster, you’d probably add in one cup of over-indebted budgeting, and then you’d add a generous sprinkle of defund the police. That’s exactly what has happened in Chicago, where the city’s radical progressive leaders have spent its treasury on their political priorities and defunded the police. In a city that was already one of America’s worst for crime, things are now getting scarier. Judge Glock reports in City Journal, writing:
A fight broke out late one Saturday night, or, more accurately, early Sunday morning, at a bar on Chicago’s South Side. Someone called the police just after 4:30 AM. But the police didn’t come. The fight soon moved outside; one man issued a threat, got into his car, and then plowed it into the crowd, just before five o’clock. Three people were killed. Still no police. An officer wasn’t dispatched until 5:20 and didn’t arrive until more than an hour after the original call.
Chicago faces a dire police shortage. (See “Can We Get Back to Tougher Policing?,”) Over half of high-priority 911 calls had no cops available to respond. One important reason is that the city is now allocating almost half of its budget to debt and pensions, leaving ever less for essential services, including public safety. The municipal government is acting more like a conduit channeling money from residents to check-collectors than a protector of its citizens’ rights and liberties.
Chicago has dominated America’s heartland since the late nineteenth century. As the City of the Big Shoulders, it has been a place whose self-reliance and drive allowed it to compete with coastal metros boasting more obvious advantages. Chicago’s landscape and weather may leave something to be desired, but the city’s combination of cosmopolitanism and localism, embodied in its diverse neighborhoods, has helped give it a distinctive American personality. Yet bad services, corrupt politics, and elevated crime have made life in Chicago increasingly unpleasant, all worsened by the city’s parlous finances.
An ever-mounting debt burden is the greatest threat to the city’s survival. As that problem worsens, more residents will question whether they want to stay in a windswept city paying down someone else’s pension—or decamp for places that don’t place such a millstone around their citizens’ necks.
According to the group Truth in Accounting, Chicago continues to live up to its moniker “Second City” in at least one respect: it has the second-worst debt load of any big city in America—about $43,000 per taxpayer, or almost $40 billion in total. The first is New York City, but Chicago residents also have to deal with Illinois’ debts, which total $42,000 per taxpayer, third worst in the nation. Thus, a family moving to Chicago suddenly becomes the inheritor of almost $85,000 in liabilities. By this metric, Chicago is no longer second but has by far the worst debt burden of any major city.
Chicago’s accumulating debt might be bearable if the city had low taxes and therefore room to raise them and pay down some of the liabilities. But taxes in the Windy City already rank among the nation’s harshest. According to a national study, Chicago’s combined city and state taxes would eat up over 12 percent of a U.S. median family income. The only large cities with higher proportionate taxes are Rust Belt towns with much smaller populations, such as Detroit and Newark. Chicago imposes the highest sales tax of any major city (10.25 percent) and punishing property taxes, too.
Chicago’s taxation is also brutal on businesses. A recent study of 53 cities found that Chicago’s tax on industrial properties was nearly double the average of other cities. Chicago’s commercial property-tax rate, at more than 4 percent per year, was by far the worst of any major city and more than twice the average.
High debt and taxes might be manageable if the city’s economic fundamentals were strong. They’re not. Chicago relied for years on commercial properties, especially downtown offices in the Loop, to power its economy and fund the city’s excesses. But those jobs are fleeing. Downtown Chicago’s office vacancy rate recently approached 24 percent, a record high. Boeing has moved its headquarters from the Loop to Northern Virginia. These white-collar firms will not pay the city’s higher taxes in the future; they won’t even pay their existing leases.
Action Line: When politicians spend your tax dollars on their own personal political agendas instead of the important business of actually running their jurisdictions, you get Chicago. Is it any wonder Americans, especially cops, are fleeing big blue blob cities like the Windy City? You can’t rely on police, and they don’t want you to own a gun to defend yourself. Who wants to live at the mercy of the criminals when the Soros-backed DAs will simply let them out of jail with no bail? If that’s not the life you want to live, look for a better America. Start your search with Your Survival Guy’s 2024 Super States. In the meantime, click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy
Latest posts by E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy (see all)
- Your Survival Guy in Paris: Your Prior Planning - October 15, 2024
- America’s Aging Power Grid Could Stunt AI Growth - October 15, 2024
- California’s Gas Pump Price Controls - October 15, 2024
- Your Survival Guy in Paris: The Greatest Cafés - October 14, 2024
- ROGUE BUREAUCRATS: Trump Declares War on the Deep State - October 14, 2024
