Chicago’s Financial Problems Are NOT From COVID-19

Chicago and Cook County have been ignoring problems for so long, they don’t know what actually paying the bills would look like. Maybe it is just Standard Operating Procedure at this point. In any event they want the federal .gov to solve their problems.

Meep at STUMP continues on the review of states/cities in trouble with Polities Under Fiscal Pressure: Chicago and Cook County.

I wanted to quote one of Meep’s titles for the title of this post, but there are so many choices picking one is hard. “Deep in the Suck” or “A Big Ball of Bad Ideas” were contenders, but I also appreciated the reference to the Stevie Smith poem “Not Waving But Drowning.”

As you can guess by the list of past posts on the fiscal state of Chicago, below, or the few I’ve mentioned already, things are not good in Chicago. Things are not a lot better in Cook County.

They both want bailouts. They are both trying to blame the pandemic.

There are snippets from interviews with Chicago Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, and even a few words form Ammar Rizki, Cook County’s Chief Financial Officer. But really all you have to do is look at the litany of woe of past posts by Meep, which she has thoughtfully collected for us.

It’s much, much worse.

• 2014: Public Pension Watch: Chicago, Not Waving But Drowning
• 2014: Public Pension Watch: How Screwed is Chicago? (spoiler alert: a lot)
• 2015: Chicago Pensions Watch: What does Chicago Say About Its Own Pensions?
• 2015: Chicago and Illinois Pensions Watch: History and Who is Serious
• 2016: The Meaning of the Word “Fault”: Chicago Pensions Edition
• 2016: Rahm’s “Win” Means Pensions Lose or You Can’t Tell Us We Can’t Kick the Can, Rauner!
• 2016: The State of Chicago: Deep in the Suck
• 2017: Watching the Money Run Out: A Simulation with a Chicago Pension
• 2017: Geeking Out: Testing Chicago MEABF to Destruction
• 2017: Sunday Dumpery: Cook County Soda Tax, Chicago Pension Funding, and More
• 2018: Chicago Pension Obligation Bond Idea: It’s the Discount Rate, Stupid
• 2018: Chicago is a Big Ball of Bad Ideas
• 2019: Chicago Mayoral Race: Screwed No Matter Who You Choose, Thanks to Unfunded Pensions

Now, that may seem like a lot of posts, but more are here in my Chicago post compilation [which stops around 2017… I really should go back sometime.]

The compilation post is truly massive. And to think people accuse me of picking on Chicago, but they make it so damn easy.

Chicago is in for a bumpy ride, but it really doesn’t have much to do with COVID-19. You should definitely review the link at the top of this post. There is a lot of material. But the most important is that Chicago and Cook County expect you to pay for their insanity from the past decades.