No one sounded more bemused and outraged at whoever did this to Chicago than Mayor Brandon Bear of Little Brains Johnson yesterday.
Hizzoner was bummed - bummed, I tell you - acknowledging that he didn't have the first clue where HIS city was going to get its next dollar from.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson sounded the alarm Tuesday about Chicago's finances.
"We have reached a point of no return," Mayor Johnson said Tuesday. "The systems that people rely upon — education, health care, housing, our transportation — they are woefully underfunded, and everyone knows that. Everyone knows what, you know, my commitment is to progressive revenue. I can't do this by myself."
The mayor's statement came in response to a question about a pension bill signed into law by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker last week.
Of course, as he also doesn't have the first clue how the city found itself in such dire financial straits - who's in charge here? - his defensive reaction about not being able to do anything about it 'by himself' was classic Johnson.
Now, the one thing you can't really pin all on Johnson, inept and pathetic as he is, is the mess that Chicago's underfunded municipal pensions find themselves in. That started, according to one expert, way back in the Daley administration. It's pretty illuminating taking a peek at how these pension costs balloon when they aren't funded properly from the get-go.
Yeah, I get that cities see that pension money allotted in a budget and it's tempting to divert it for agenda items needed now, on the assumption you can always catch up later. But it's not that easy and will most certainly bite hard on the backend, which is where Mayor Johnson finds himself right now.
This is a great explanation of how reasonable pension costs for Chicago would be had successive administrations not raided the kitty.
...Mistakes Have Consequences
One thing I think worth highlighting here is just how explicitly we’re paying for the mistakes of earlier administrations (mostly Daley) not fully funding pensions. We can put a dollar number on this. The four pension funds’ annual reports break out the ‘normal cost,’ which is the amount that our liability increased from active employees accruing another year of benefits. You can think of this as what the city would have to contribute if we had no unfunded liability. For the coming year, our total normal cost across the four funds is around $438 million. Because we’re tremendously underfunded, the city instead is statutorily required to pay roughly $2.6 billion into the funds. That extra $2.2 billion is the cost we’re incurring for the underfunding of the past.
That’s a huge number! Last year’s budget was around $17.3 billion in total, so we’re talking about 12% our budget going just towards digging ourselves out of this hole. The city’s facing a budget gap of over a billion dollars this year, and the bad decisions we made 10-15 years ago are a big reason why. When we talk about the need for good fiscal choices today, and making hard decisions about structural reforms instead of high interest borrowing or wonky structures that postpone hard choices for many years, this is why. Bad choices have consequences for many, many years to come.
Unfortunately for Chicago, there is still not an adult anywhere near the helm. The pension fund management is so disbursed that the fees alone are over $500M a year.
Chicago’s pension funds pay millions in fees to over 80 investment firms, yet a simple index strategy outperformed them all during the past decade. These firms are getting paid to underachieve. Over $500 million in fees and forgone returns over the past decade. pic.twitter.com/gbz4RgofLC
— Frank Calabrese (@FrankCalabrese) July 19, 2025
So, when the city council is meant to act as the brakes on a mayor who is clueless, and they don't?
Key City Panel Narrowly Rejects Push to Require City Council Super Majority to Authorize New Debt
A key City Council committee voted 16-17 on Monday to reject a proposal that would have required the approval of at least 34 members of the Chicago City Council before the city could take on new debt.
The rare rejection by the City Council’s Finance Committee means the proposal will not advance to the full City Council for a final vote.
Authored by Ald. Marty Quinn (13th Ward), a frequent opponent of Mayor Brandon Johnson, the proposal represented the latest attempt by critics of the mayor to reduce his power and cast him as a poor steward of the city’s finances, which have been badly out of whack for decades.
Quinn said the measure would give 17 members of the City Council the power to stop Johnson from burdening future generations with massive debt obligations. Other supporters said it would require the mayor to negotiate with more members of the City Council to get his initiatives over the finish line.
'Cast' Johnson as a 'poor steward of the city's finances'? Oh, I think he's centralcasting on that charge all by his loneself. Johnson needs no outside help being painted with the spendthrift brush.
This measure failing, however, means the mayor, who has never met another dollar he couldn't borrow and squander, is going to be unleashed when another crisis comes along.
In a state where the oversized billionaire governor has presidential aspirations that require some largesse spreading to public unions, another fiscal calamity hitting Chicago didn't take long to materialize.
Jelly Belly Pritzker and his minions in the legislature dropped a 3% annualized pension raise on public sector pensions for first responders that looks to add about $11B to Chicago's unfunded liability.
J.B. Pritzker saddled Chicago with over $11 billion in new pension debt to curry favor with public sector unions ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run—knowing full well it will deepen the city’s already calamitous fiscal crisis. pic.twitter.com/1zMlk9cSix
— Jesse Arm (@Jesse_Leg) August 5, 2025
The requirement would drop the funded part of the ratio from an already sketchy, near the lowest in the nation, less than 25% to almost 18%. That's skirting insolvency.
Recap:
— Susana A. Mendoza ☮️ (@susanamendoza10) August 4, 2025
The city's finances just got a whole lot worse as did retirement security for first responders.
Police & fire pensions will go from a worst-in-the-nation <25% funding ratio to a near insolvent <18%.
Let's go back to basics. Do no harm and stop digging a bigger hole.
Johnson's already been gasping for air like a landed bass in interviews when he's quizzed about the various schemes he's floating to cover the meteor crater-sized hole in the budget. Some of them sound brilliant to socialists who've never held a job or run a business, but have run businesses out of town and wondered what happened to the projected revenues.
WHERE DEY GO?
when I was on the budget committee at CME, I saw what we paid in this tax and immediately wondered if we could move people to the suburbs to avoid it
— pointsnfigures (@pointsnfigures1) July 29, 2025
And as always, dealing with the Tool of the Teachers Union that is Johnson, the CTU comes up in any discussion of the city's finances. There must always be something in it for them before anyone else gets in line.
And don't even think about that 'A' word - austerity.
The financial impact is bad. In many ways the politics are worse. How can you ask Chicagoans to sign up for decades of austerity, if lawmakers just increase promised benefits again whenever the city starts to right the ship? pic.twitter.com/6xOutX9mHp
— Richard Day (@richsday) August 4, 2025
How can you ask Chicagoans to live like this?
Well.
"We have reached a point of no return," Mayor Johnson said Tuesday
How long have they been voting to become Detroit?
I heard the men saying something
The captains tell they pay you well
And they say they need sailing men to
Show the way and leave today
Was it you that said, how long?
How long?...You cried with fear, the point was near
Was it you that said
How long, how long, how long to the point of no return?
How long, how long to the point of no return
No return
How long...
Eventually and inevitably, it will come crashing down.
