http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425582/print In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel Faces a Crisis Brought on by Progressive Politics
By George Will — October 14, 2015
Chicago — A Midwestern humorist, Indiana’s Kin Hubbard, said people often confuse bad management with destiny. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel knows better. He must play the cards that fate has dealt him, and he is too polite, or at least too prudent, to say that another name for fate is Democratic rule of the city since 1931.
During the past 84 years, the growth of the public sector has been mostly driven by the alliance between elected politicians and public-sector unions. This has made Chicago emblematic of the coast-to-coast crisis of what Walter Russell Mead has labeled the “blue model” of municipal and state governance.
It is not Emanuel’s fault that Chicago’s three largest employers, after the federal government, are the public-school system, the city government, and Cook County’s government. Although Emanuel is a product of the Chicago politics that made Barack Obama, the crisis brought on by such politics now requires Emanuel to take many measures to make Chicago an exception to the nation’s economic lethargy under Obama.
Emanuel’s task — condign punishment for any Democrat — is to salvage the blue model by making the private sector dynamic enough to generate tax revenues sufficient to fund improvident public contracts and their pension promises. Hence Emanuel’s focus on K–12 education.
A circle with a radius of 275 miles from Chicago’s Loop includes nine Big Ten campuses (and the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and many others) that furnish a steady stream of graduates drawn to urban life. The challenge is to hold these taxpayers in the city when they have school-age children. Hence Emanuel’s enthusiasm for — scarcity can be the mother of courage — charter schools, which horrify the Democratic party’s paymasters in the teachers’ unions.
Emanuel and the city’s school system, the nation’s third-largest, want aid from the state. This is, as the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore says, like Puerto Rico begging from Greece. Although state pension payments have grown from $60 million to more than $650 million since 2006, Illinois still ranks 50th among states in the lowest percentage of funded pension obligations (47.1). After 13 downgrades in six years, Illinois, which is not paying many of its vendors or even winners of the state lottery, is 50th among the states in credit rating.
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