With Chicago facing a billion-dollar deficit this year and Mayor Brandon Johnson sporting a 6.6% approval rating, the Windy City has decided to quadruple down on its profligacy. By a 26-23 vote margin, the City Council approved $830 million in new borrowing through a truly bonkers bond scheme that would defer paying down interest for two years and principal for 20, after which the city would have to pay out $821 million, bringing the total cost of the plan to some $2 billion.

This isn’t a “buy now, pay later” loan — it’s buy now, pray later, as there’s no way in hell that the city will ever be capable of paying back such a debt. Chicago doesn’t need another Ponzi scheme that simply punts its debt problem to another decade; the city needs its own Department of Government Efficiency to start slashing spending.

Chicago has spent more than $612 million on illegal immigrants in the past two years alone, with at least half a billion of that share allocated to just two companies that staff and establish migrant shanty towns. The city’s overall outlays have surged 58% since before the pandemic to annual expenditures of $17 billion. More than a tenth of the increase is due to additional “community services,” and another quarter a product of increased pension costs. The city’s plus-$51 billion pension debt is greater than that of 44 other states, with seven of its pensions cracking the nation’s top 10 worst-funded pensions. Nearly half of the city’s budget goes to retirement funds and servicing its already existing debt.

The new bond boondoggle would compound the problem. Chicago already owes some $29 billion in outstanding bonds. The new bond program, which would compensate for failing to pay down any principal until 2045 with a more than 300% increase in principal payments after that, would pay well above a 6% effective yield over 40 years, much higher than the current 30-year Treasury yield of 4.6% or even the 40-year High Quality Market Corporate Bond yield of 5.5% to 5.9%.

In other words, Chicago is offering an absurd risk premium (nearly $400 million in interest payments more than the 30-year Treasury) because it either knows it cannot pay investors back or worse, trusts that Springfield or Uncle Sam will eventually bail it out.

TRUMP’S HEALTH INFLATION BLUNDER ON IVF

In a microcosm of Washington, D.C.’s decadence but on steroids, Chicago doesn’t have a revenue problem; it has a wasteful spending program. Its population, the city’s lowest in over a century, has fallen by 4% just since 2020, yet the number of city government employees increased by a third in that time. The point of this scheme isn’t to pay for supposed infrastructure investments or to reimburse lenders at all. Rather, the city government needs a cash infusion now to keep the grift going, and taxpayers, somehow, will be stuck with the bill.

Already investors seem to expect that Chicago will default. Even before this vote, S&P Global downgraded Chicago’s bond rating to BBB, just one tier above the lowest possible investment grade. The city government’s latest gambit is so shameless and so forwardly fraudulent that it should shatter whatever veneer of plausible deniability Chicago’s defenders could maintain. Lest the city’s residents be able to kick the current government out, DOGE should set its sights on Chicago and try to work its way within.