The editors of the Chicago Tribune remark on Chicago’s budget shortfall:
Most city money goes on personnel: salaries, benefits, pension costs. Most of the increased revenue ideas we know about risk unintended consequences, are going to take a lot of time to implement, and may require approval at the state level.
Johnson could also use someone to remind him that his job as the city’s chief executive is to get the best available deals for the city, and its taxpayers, and it’s not to pay contractors, vendors and the like as much as possible, just because he thinks the world should be so.
I wonder where they got that idea? What if Mayor Johnson, rather than seeing it as his job “to get the best available deals for the city”, sees his job as allocating money, picking winners and losers? And ensuring his own re-election, of course.
