Stacy Davis Gates, president of what is, in effect, Chicago’s government — the Chicago Teachers Union — has at last done something helpful. Having denounced school choice as fascist (Mussolini favored it? Who knew?) and, of course, racist (what isn’t?), she has enrolled her son in a private school. This is so that (she recently explained to her union members) “he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs.”
Davis Gates has erased the patina of idealism that cloaks the CTU’s sacrifice of students on the altar of its avarice. By diminishing her union, her hypocrisy might benefit its victims, who include K-12 students imprisoned in dysfunctional public schools. Other victims are the rest of the city’s shrinking population, buffeted by progressive policies implemented by politicians who are the CTU’s poodles.
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Progressive politicians produce high tax rates. (Among U.S. cities, Chicago has the second-highest commercial property taxes and, as of 2021, the highest combined state and local sales taxes.) Progressive prosecutors produce demoralized police and high crime rates. (Arrests were made in just 12 percent of crimes in 2021, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.) Crime and taxes cause renters to abandon commercial real estate leases. (Kroll Bond Rating Agency says the rate of delinquent or otherwise distressed commercial real estate loans in August, in the single digits nationally, was 22.7 percent in Chicago, the worst among major U.S. cities.) Nearby retail and restaurant enterprises struggle and fail. Homeowners’ taxes rise to compensate for plunging commercial property valuations. Residents flee. Decline accelerates.
Inspired by George Will’s column on Chicago’s dysfunction, GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino writes more.
Surely everyone should try not to be as insulting as Mrs. Clinton is. But if her political agenda is to break the American notion that we should be in charge of our own lives and free to say what we want, then what else can one feel but gratitude that she never got the chance to act on this totalitarian impulse?
New England-born-and-bred GMU Econ alum – and my former student – Jon Murphy, now teaching at my undergraduate alma mater (Nicholls State University) in the swamps of south Louisiana, puts modern ‘problems’ in historical perspective. (DBx: Jon – born, I think, in 1989 – isn’t quite correct to say that cars in the 1970s had no air-conditioning. Many did. But many did not. AC in automobiles back then certainly was not close to being universal as it is today. My parents did not own a car with AC until 1975, the year I turned 17, when they bought a used 1974 Buick LeSabre.)
Alain Bertaud explains “what is wrong with Henry George-type taxation.”
Juliette Sellgren talks with Larry Reed about U.S. presidents.
Michael Senger tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
One of the saddest things about the response to COVID is the vast denial among the majority about what they just did to themselves. All that work for decades to make cities like NY and SF more livable vanished in a blink for nothing but cowardice and sycophancy to corrupt elites.
