Sweet Home Chicago

Here's a short article by Roger Kimball about my home area of Chicago that suggests serious trouble both now and in the near future:
"* In the last six months, 292 people were murdered in Chicago.
* In the same period, there were 183 Americans casualties in Iraq.

* The Illinois State pension fund is $44 billion in debt. That's the worst in the country. Thanks, folks!
* Cook County, wherein Chicago sits, not only put JFK in the White House back in 1960 by encouraging everyone, dead or alive, to vote early and vote often, but it also has the highest sales tax in the United STates: 10.25 percent.
* Meanwhile, the Chicago school system is one of the worst in the country."

I've been joking that Illinois will go for Obama even if every dead person in Chicago has to vote five times. Behind that is a conversation I had as an election judge a few years ago with a fellow election judge about how he had personally been sent out to graveyards on election day in 1960 to find hundreds of votes for JFK. He could tell me that freely because the statute of limitations had run out. So far as I can tell, nothing in our area has changed since to prevent a recurrence.

I'm definitely finding other places to shop, now that my county has the highest sales tax in the country, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

I wonder where those missing pension dollars will be found, given that they are guaranteed by the Illinois constitution? There's no point blaming most of the state employees; they put up their share of pension contributions. It's our state government that never actually got around to funding pensions properly, even back when Republicans were in charge in Springfield.

There's also been some obvious abuse by entities goosing up the last year of pay of favored state employees, since the pension is somewhat based on the final salary. There was an effort this year to require such entities to personally kick in any added pension costs for such goosing, but I don't recall that reform effort succeeding.

One recent ray of hope in IL was State Senator James Meeks' effort this fall to bus poor kids from the south side to rich northern suburbs to call attention to the educational plight of city kids. I haven't seen any actual results from the campaign yet, but it's great to see even some Democrats now see school choice as good for kids otherwise forced into the worst schools.

We fostered one of those kids last fall, and it was amazing how much better he did in a suburban school When he arrived in October, he was a second grader who couldn't count to ten. Two months later, he'd advanced a year educationally - doing first grade level work, but the most telling fact for me was that when he went back into Chicago schools they put him in an honors class in his original grade! If that's typical, no wonder Meeks wants those kids educated anywhere else.