Courtesy of Mish.
I will be on CNBC again Friday, with Rick Santelli. This will be my third appearance, all discussing the sorry state of affairs in Chicago.
Spotlight will likely be on my post a week ago: Emanuel Fiddles While Chicago Burns; Public Schools Over the Edge; 9% Cloud Tax on Data Streaming; Emanuel Eyes Property Tax Hikes.
It is very difficult to say what really needs to be said in a 3-5 minute time horizon, typically 4 minutes, so expect an animated summary.
Pension Economics
Michael Bargo, writer for the American Thinker, provides more commentary for the mix.
Here is a lengthy snip from Bargo's recent, well-written article Public Pensions Prove Zero Sum Economics.
One of the major appeals in Democrat presidential campaigns is to explain to voters that they need Democrats in office to take money away from the rich. And since the rich own big corporations, they will pay workers as little as possible. This idea is what Barack Obama had in mind in 2008 when he said he will redistribute money to the working class and poor.
But so far this analysis has only been applied to the private sector; the “rich” who own stocks or run corporations. If public sector workers, particularly pensioners who are not working, are taking significant amounts of money from taxpayers, then this may also be seen as contributing to the shrinkage of middle class incomes.
Of course, Illinois is not the only state dominated by high Democrat taxes and public sector spending but it serves as a good case study of what Democrats do when they have total control of budgets for decades.
The results are startling. Today, Chicago’s public sector unions are underfunded, according to the City itself, by $26.8 billion. This is just the City of Chicago. When the state debt is added, the total amount of debt owed by each Chicago household to the city and state rise, according to the Illinois Policy Institute, to $61,000. SEC Commissioner Gallagher stated the number is $88,000.
Pension payments to Chicago public union employees have become so high that today all the property taxes paid by the households of Chicago go exclusively to pensions. The operating expenses are paid by additional taxes on things from packs of cigarettes, to gasoline, sales tax, and cable TV bills. Given these facts about how Chicago’s property taxes are used, it’s not surprising that its new Republican governor wants to freeze property taxes to rescue the middle class’s paychecks from Democrats.
Illinois Democrats have indentured the taxpayers of the state to turn over historic amounts of their incomes to government, shrinking Illinois’ middle class….
Picture via Pixabay.
