Given that Chicago is the nation’s 3rd largest city, and finances itself pretty much like every other big US city, a threat like this has potential implications for scores of other cities and ought to be national news. But it wasn’t It made a local Chicago headline and dropped down the memory hole, out of sight. Why? The senator’s threat wasn’t national news because the plain facts beneath it, might have made Chicagoans and people in your city as well even more disturbed.
A great deal of Chicago’s debt is pension debt. Pensions are deferred wages which employees agreed to allow the city or state to deposit into prudently invested pension funds so they would be available for payout years later upon their retirement. But public officials in Chicago, in Illinois and in cities, counties and whole states across the US broke these agreements, frequently violated the law and didn’t make these payments, sometimes for decades. Now that the payouts are due, they need to blame it on “greedy teachers” or anything that will keep them from taxing the rich, which is the only place that kind of money can be had.
In Chicago, and very likely in your town too they doubled down on their dishonesty by investing hundreds of billions in pensions and other funds as well in exotic investment devices, credit default swaps, derivatives, real estate and stock market schemes which their investment advisors and ratings agencies assured them were sound and lucrative, but turned out to be black holes.