By Steve Rhodes
“City of Chicago debt payments are expected to soar by $278 million next year to the record level of $1.55 billion, according to a city financial analysis released Tuesday by Mayor Rahm Emanuel,” the Tribune reports.
I hope we’ve learned by now not to trust any numbers coming out of the Emanuel administration, but then again, not learning that lesson helped get us into this mess in the first place.
“The debt problem began to grow a decade ago, under former Mayor Richard Daley. Overall city long-term debt has nearly doubled during the past 10 years as the city borrowed money to expand O’Hare International Airport, upgrade its sewer and water systems, fix streets and build new libraries and police stations. More than $1 billion also was borrowed to pay retroactive police and fire raises and cover legal judgments against the city. Payments are expected to surge in 2013 because of the way the debt is structured.”
At the same time, while Daley was hardly a prudent or even attentive manager when it came to spending, these stories always forget the enormous fact that it was Wall Street’s recklessness and greed that imploded the economy and is chiefly to blame for turning manageable problems into unmitigated disasters.
Now, however, we have every right to judge officeholders – including the president – for how they respond to crises we know they inherited but we hired to solve.
Posted on August 1, 2012