The bad thing about socialists is that they are incompetent. The good thing is that sometimes that incompetence prevents them from digging an ever deeper hole that future leaders will have to dig out of, which was shown by the latest failure from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Chicago is facing a $175 million budget hole thanks to Johnson’s mismanagement, the second straight year Chicago has dealt with a budget deficit. Part of Johnson’s grand plan to fill that budget hole was to take a short-term, high-interest loan for pensions for nonteaching school employees. This inevitable disaster was such a high priority for Johnson that he forced out the Chicago Public Schools CEO over his opposition to the loan, leading to an exodus of school board members who resigned in solidarity.
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Johnson replaced those members, whom he appointed in 2023, with new appointees whom he thought would back his big giveaway plan to his teacher union buddies. But the new board approved a budget by a 12-8 vote that did not include Johnson’s requested loan plan, relying instead on potential future funds from the Democratic state government, which had already rejected Johnson’s funding request last year. Johnson rigged the game in his favor, and he still managed to lose.
In fact, earlier this year, the Chicago City Council voted in favor of borrowing a whopping $830 million, though it came with a restriction preventing Johnson from using any of it on anything related to education.
This doesn’t mean that Johnson isn’t doing plenty of damage to Chicago. The city is, of course, borrowing $830 million for other projects. Johnson is overseeing the city’s second budget deficit in as many years. Johnson has made it harder for police to identify the origin of gunshots in communities because he thinks policing is racist. He has been mayor for the most violent two-year stretch in the city since 2011-12. Johnson wants raises for his teacher union friends while reading and math scores in Chicago Public Schools have tanked. Johnson’s approval has gone up 20 points since February, which sounds great until you realize that it went up from 6% to 26%.
Johnson is so incompetent that he can’t even drive the city into the ground effectively, which is what this loan saga shows. He got all the conditions he wanted, from forcing out opponents of his plan to replacing them with loyalists to having the city face a budget deficit that could drive the desperation to accept his loan plan. He could not get the result, though, because his agenda has grown so disastrous that it even breaks through the progressive malaise of Chicago governance.
Johnson’s incompetence is impressive even for a socialist. He might just be the worst mayor in the country, the latest failure in Chicago’s recent history of exponentially worse failures. Johnson’s Chicago was supposed to be a model for socialism in American cities, and the results bode ill for the voters in New York and Minneapolis who are courting the Windy City’s fate.