Muni Bankruptcy: Who's Next?

When liberals try to say that only Detroit is a mess, I have to laugh.  I have lived in and around Chicago for most of my life. Both the city, Cook County and the State of Illinois are on the one party road to ruin. The pension liabilities of these entities dwarf their ability to pay. The Democrat "Reform" Governor can't get the Democrat legislature to agree to even micro steps toward fixing the pension problems because the public employee unions own the legislature and refuse to see the state pension liabilities reduced in any way. Raising taxes has been the only politically correct answer so far. The corruption is legendary, and jokes about it are common. For example, Illinois governors get 3 terms: 2 in office and one in jail. The last Democrat Governor is in jail, as is the previous Republican Governor. The difference is that when the last Republican Governor went to jail, the Illinois Republican party was almost completely destroyed in the following election. When Democrat Rod Blagojevich followed Republican George Ryan into prison, the next election brought minimal to no electoral or policy changes. Some of the Democrat office holders were replaced by other Democrats. A Cook County sales tax increase was repealed. That's it. The State of Illinois no longer pays its bills on time. Getting further and further behind is the only way the state can borrow more money because its credit rating is lower than California's. I think that the public employee unions are counting on native son "The One" to save them with a big bailout. Since the states created the federal government, federal bankruptcy laws do not cover states, just municipalities. When Illinois defaults, nobody really knows what is going to happen. Maybe they'll just keep raising taxes until everybody moves to Indiana or Wisconsin.

The Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) received the nickname "Hell Upon Detroit" for reasons that are now evident. For some reason, reactionary liberalism doesn't do very well in practice no matter how good it looks in theory.

Articles on Detroit:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353862/detroit-goes-down-kevin-d-williamson

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/354461/steins-law-charles-krauthammer