The Awful Truth in Illinois

At City Journal Steve Malanga recaps outgoing Rahm Emanuel’s warning to the Chicago City Council:

The more troubling that the fiscal situation in Illinois becomes, the less levelheaded local officials sound about facing up to their problems. That was evident last week, in the reaction that incoming governor Jay Pritzker and several Chicago mayoral candidates had to a speech by outgoing Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel on the state’s deep pension problems.

Speaking before the city council, Emanuel, who will not seek reelection, warned that raising taxes alone won’t solve the city’s own pension troubles. Emanuel has run into opposition—in the courts and in Springfield—to his efforts to cut pensions costs, and he pointed out that the city has already raised taxes several times, including a huge property-tax increase in 2016, just to cover the growing pension costs. Chicago will need more new revenue as it faces sharply higher pension payments over the next two years, including $276 million in additional annual contributions just for the city’s public-safety retirement system. Emanuel urged the state to consider sweeping fixes, including changes to the state’s constitution, and he argued that the course favored by the Democratic Party’s increasingly powerful progressive wing—to solve the problem by taxing the wealthy—endangered prosperity. “You’re going to cut jobs doing that,” Emanuel said.

Those who will soon be in charge of trying to fix the mess jumped to dismiss Emanuel’s ideas. Oversimplifying the issue, state comptroller Susana Mendoza, a candidate for mayor, said, “We do not mess with people’s pensions,” adding, “End of story.” Former city hall insider Gery Chico, also running for mayor, somewhat naively suggested that one way to fix the problem is to “figure out how to do things better,” as if saving a few dollars here and there could possibly suffice. Former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot likened the movement to reform pensions to pulling “the rug out from under” city employees and retirees, while incoming governor Pritzker was equally simplistic in his dismissal of Emanuel’s ideas: “I believe when you’re promised something . . . you ought to get whatever you’ve been promised.”

Much as I detest him I think that Emanuel’s warning is what any honest Illinois politician would say in private and not seeking re-election. At this point the question is not whether Illinois local and state government will go bankrupt but when and what havoc they will create along the way. As long as we hold to the state constitution’s present requirements on pensions the state’s only workable option is to drive the wages of public employees down in self-defense.

That’s not going to happen so it can only end in disaster. The only remaining question is whether the disaster will take the Democratic Party along with it.