INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Decline In Obama’s Chicago Clue To His Second Term.
Another weekend of violence in the president’s hometown, now run by his former chief of staff. If you want to see the fruits of a presidential second term, look at the decline of his city.
President Obama and Rahm Emanuel, current mayor and former White House chief of staff, brought the “Chicago Way” to Washington in more ways than one. Not only did they bring a style of bare-knuckled backroom politics of intimidation and cronyism, they brought a statist philosophy of government knows best that has left America’s Second City a second-rate city with nowhere to go but down.
Last weekend was all too typical in Chicago these days, with four dead and 29 wounded throughout a city that’s been home to one of the nation’s toughest gun laws. Chicago has become the murder capital of America with a 50% increase in violence for the past year.
Obama recently paid his hometown, where he maintains a residence, a visit. As Wayne Allyn Root, writing on FoxNews.com, noted, 35 were injured and seven killed in gun battles with the president home that weekend. Included in that violent mess was a 16-year-old girl. Three of the murder victims were killed in one hour on Sunday morning. It was the third weekend in a row with gunshot murders and injuries in the double digits.
How’s that gun control workin’ out for ya? But wait, there’s more:
Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas recently disclosed a staggering $108 billion debt tab across various governing bodies in the county that translates to $63,525 per Chicago household. Unfunded pension liabilities make up nearly a quarter of that. Not all the debt is Chicago’s, a city with the nation’s highest sales tax, but enough of it is.
Chicago lost 200,000 people from 2000 to 2009. The only one of the nation’s 15 largest cities to lose people. Of all cities, it fell between Detroit, reigning champion of progressive urban decay, and hurricane ravaged New Orleans, in the number of people fleeing to greener pastures.
As Aaron M. Renn writes in City Journal, during the first decade of this century Chicago lost 7.1% of its jobs. Chicago’s famous Loop, the second-largest business district in the nation, lost 18.6% of its private-sector jobs.
Wherever “progressive” policies are tried, the result is the same.