An honest look at what it is going to take to affect change in Chicago.
From 2011 through 2018 Portlandia aired on the IFC. Set in Portland, Oregon, the television series was a sketch comedy spoofing the town’s eccentric liberal hipsters. Worth mentioning however, is that the show’s origins date back another six years to when its producers started with periodic internet shorts.
Take a second to consider that; while Chicago was beginning to work its way through Mayor Richard M. Daley’s final term in office, Portland had already established itself as a city full of insufferable liberals making life worse for one another. So much so that they made a TV series about it. Now, two decades later, the situation in Portland is worse than ever and without any indication of turning itself around.
Just last week Portland, a city 1/4 the size of Chicago, discovered a second corpse in as many weeks rotting in a homeless encampment. This despite the current mayor’s pledge to end homelessness within his first year in office. Naturally, the dead bodies were found 20 months into Ted Wheeler’s first term.
Lacking any sense of self-reflection, the citizens of Portland continue to embrace the same liberal policies which have brought them immeasurable unnecessary suffering. For people in Chicago, that should start to sound familiar.
Portland is full of liberal people who truly believe their barbaric living situation is not a result of their own actions. i.e. In their minds, there is no nexus between their own bad decision making and the consequences of their actions. Therefore, it’s reasonable to anticipate the people of Portland will continue to vote for the next two decades just as they have in the past.
Whereas Chicago is full of liberal people who truly believe the unrelenting crime and insurmountable debt situation is not a result of their own actions, they too will continue to vote just as they have in the past.
The problems with Chicago’s governance will not self-correct because Chicago’s liberal voters are incapable of self-correction.
It’s Insane to Attempt the Impossible
Ben Shapiro is kinda famous for going on college campuses and repeating the phrase, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Although true, facts are a terribly unpersuasive. So while the statement makes a great bumper sticker, it’s essentially useless in convincing any leftist of anything because today’s modern liberal is only governed by their feelings.
Although lesser known, a far more constructive statement was popularized by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. Adams is credited with giving us, “Feelings don’t care about your facts.”
Nearly a lifetime ago your humble writer was discussing the 9/11 attack with a friend. Despite my explaining the “facts” that: the jet fuel was all consumed within 4-5 seconds of impact, the remaining fire (paper, desks, carpeting) was burning hotter than the jet fuel burned, the steel did not in fact “melt” but was severely softened/weakened by the heat from the resulting fire, and that I was confident in these facts having acquired an engineering degree, my friend was unmoved. He insisted the twin towers fell as a result of a controlled demolition.
It was then that I asked him a simple question:
Is there any piece of information I could give you that would make you change your mind?
He answered, “No.”
I responded, “Ok, so you’re a fanatic, a zealot.”
After a long awkward moment of silence we went to lunch, had a wonderful time, and I don’t believe we ever discussed the subject again.
There are two points to be made here:
- On this particular occasion & dealing with this particular topic, my friend was governed by his feelings; facts were completely irrelevant.
- Never argue with a zealot.
This is just human nature. Talk to any counsellor or therapist and they will tell you how difficult it is to get mentally healthy people to change their mindset. That is, it’s hard for people who “want” to get better, to improve themselves, to modify their thinking & behavior. These are people open to self-improvement trying to remove bad habits. And yet they struggle.
Considering how difficult self-actualization is among those desperate to achieve it, any improvement is quite literally impossible among individuals who don’t feel the need to change. And why would any liberal need to change? They know deep in their hearts how much they care. It’s a wonderful, powerful feeling. And they are all absolutely certain they cannot be wrong.
On political matters, leftists are zealots. Divorced from the consequences of their actions, liberals trust their feelings and will experience severe cognitive dissonance when provided any fact that may conflict therewith.
You simply cannot get a zealot to change their mind because they don’t want to.
This is how (and why) the citizens of Portland have continued their slow march towards self-annihilation for over 20 years & will continue to do so into the future.
It is also why Chicago will follow the same path.
Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts
We’re not fighting a war of facts. Everyone has access to every tidbit of current information… if they want it. The modern internet has provided us a collection of mediums & technologies which allow any one to become a subject matter expert on almost anything. Unfortunately however, that same technology creates an unlimited number of echo chambers.
We live in a world where you can receive any information you wish regardless of whether it is true or not. This is important because it means if one only wants to see information that comports with one’s gestalt or worldview one can do that. Anyone can live in their own personal universe of information that never conflicts with their feelings.
The obviously huge problem here is that such a person will believe so many things that are simply not true. These people live in a world of lies. Warm, fluffy, feel-good lies.
This is where we are currently; Chicago’s mainstream media gaslights the populace with misinformation on a daily basis & right-thinking truth-telling indie media like CWB and the Contrarian is simply ignored or even ridiculed.
That is not to say that independent media does not serve a purpose. The facts & analysis published here and elsewhere provides critical mental support for those who seek the Truth. But understand that is a different function than being persuasive. The number of times some random liberal read an article like this one and had a moment of self-realization – saying to themselves, ‘Oh my! I realize I have been wrong and I’m changing my opinion – is exactly zero.
All of the link sharing, that we all love to do, is really nothing more than trolling.
Liberals know they care and they (most of them) have good intentions.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
— Grandma
Intentions, like feelings, don’t have consequences. As such, left-thinking people – like all feeling focused individuals – go through life devoid of any responsibility for their actions.
Liberals feel good about themselves, trust their feelings over facts, and refuse to acknowledge the consequences of their behavior. So what, if anything, can break through the feelings of liberal voters?
Chicago’s Eminent Financial Collapse
They will deny it, but liberals hate rules. Rules require the strict application of facts and logic. Critical thinking is essentially kryptonite to modern leftists because they must set aside their feelings. In place of logical rules, leftists instead prefer to talk about “justice”,”equity” & making sure that those who actually contribute the most to society pay their “fair share.”
Naturally, these platitudes are all but meaningless. The term justice is subjective; it’s whatever the speaker believes (or feels) it means. Whereas one may find justice in the mantra, “you keep what you earn,” another may prefer the phrase, “if you steal it without getting caught it’s yours.”
Unfortunately for leftists, the universe has two families of laws which inevitably must be followed. This, of course, refers to the laws of physics and the laws of economics. While the former’s formulas are undoubtedly more rigid – the latter might be better described as a series of rules which can be bent (for a time) by modifying the inputs through accounting tricks or certain fiscal policies – sooner or later the numbers catch up with everyone.
In the physical world there is an old joke about a guy who jumped off a 10 story building. As he passed the 7th floor a lovely woman leaning out of a window asked him, ‘How’s it going?’ The man responded, ‘So far so good.’
In the financial world Chicago jumped off the roof maybe 25-30 years ago and passed the 5th floor 12-15 years ago. Through creative accounting, COVID money, and low interest rates, past administrations managed to slow the rate of descent. However the city is now quickly dropping past the 2nd floor and its mayor is calmly saying, ‘So far so good.’
The situation is absolutely untenable.
Starting with the state, Illinois is sitting on roughly $145B in unfunded pension liabilities across 5 different systems (TRS, SERS, SURS, JRS, & GARS.) Estimated bond debt is around $30B. The OPEB costs of SEGIP & TRIP add another $25B. All told we’re looking at over $200B in cash-on-cash debt related only to the state itself (based on last year’s numbers.)
Performing the same analysis on the county yields a similar result. Over $7B in unfunded pensions plus another $4-5B in bonds and OPEB debt yield a total of around $11B.
Then, saving the best for last, the back-of-the-envelope analysis of the city and it’s 4 pension funds, bonds, and of course the Chicago teachers’ pensions presents a staggering over $80B in debt.
Allocating the total debt across the various residential areas one can calculate that every single Chicago resident is on the hook for nearly $45,000. That’s $30,000 to the city, $2,000 to the county, and over $13,000 to the state.
Staggering.
The situation only gets worse when you take into account that approximately one-half of Chicago’s residents are not working. That means every working person in the city owes about $87,700. That exceeds the estimated average annual income ($76,000) of everyone employed in the city by 15%.
Consider the implications of that; if the city quite literally confiscated 100% of every dollar earned by every working city resident for an entire year it would not fill the staggering debt hole.
Consequently, if the mayor managed to get Springfield to approve a city income tax – something MBJ has repeatedly claimed to have wanted in order to get his ‘fair share’ – with even a modest rate of 2%, if no one moved out of the city, it would take over 50 years to fill the hole. Of course, naturally, in the real world, the exodus of the financially competent would only accelerate. Leaving fewer, and poorer, residents to pick up the slack. The economic term being used for this phenomenon is a Financial Death Spiral.
It’s worth pointing out that nearly all of this debt is unsecured cash. The money is gone. It has already been spent; or is at least owed/been pledged. This isn’t your home mortgage where after you pay it off you own the house. The city’s debt is more analogous to credit card debt. You work hard to pay it off, and in the end you own nothing.
Chicago’s factual economic reality will soon collide with the feelings of not only the city’s leadership but with its progressive voters. All collisions are violent. This one, given its size, stakes & national importance, will be particularly so. When Chicago’s leftists feel the cold steel knife of reality in their chests the explosion of outrage will be nothing short of spectacular.
Life is hard, education involves sacrifice & suffering, and having an experience is usually humbling. Sure, Chicago’s democrat leadership will blame the rich and republicans. Invectives will be directed at greedy corporations and Elon Musk. Chicago’s main stream media will provide endless articles skewering millionaires and billionaires. But in the end, the laws of economics will prevail.
Pride goeth before the fall. And not all minds will be swayed. In fact, for the true believers, the zealots, their feelings will remain the same. So much so that many will attempt to deny reality. Many will protest. Some may even riot. Leftists get violent when their phony world falls apart.
But it won’t matter. The spending and the budgets will change. And there will be a stark, painful, new economic reality of austerity which everyone will have to live with for decades, perhaps generations, to come.
In the end, leftist’s feelings will give way to facts. That is inevitable. But understand that prediction is a tricky business. Trying to pin down exactly when this is going to occur would be foolish; this is not the timeline, but the road-we-are-on.
In February there will be an election and in June we will, quite likely, have a new mayor. That person will indubitably attempt to appease the masses, the voters, and will fail. Not because of any poor policy or character flaw within the new mayor, but because Chicago’s liberal voters, governed only by their feelings, will continue to demand an economic impossibility.
Large cities across America are all walking down this same path toward inevitable self-destruction; and for the same reason. Liberal voters’ feelings don’t care about your facts. Go ahead and ask any of them how it’s going in their town and they’re sure to tell you, ‘So far so good.’