Even WaPo Agrees: Chicago's Leftism Has Doomed City
Pro tip for lefties running American cities into the ground: When you’ve lost The Washington Post, you’ve lost pretty much everyone.
Oh, granted, I’m sure maybe a few stragglers in Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration aren’t giving up the ghost. However, they’ll probably be arriving at city hall in sunglasses and phony mustaches (even the women; check your cisnormativity) for the next few weeks after The Washington Post’s editorial board slammed the Windy City on Monday.
The title pretty much says it all: “Chicago has lost its mind.” I know, some among our readership are probably shocked it happened this recently, but Mayor Johnson is an epic failure in a way that even Lori Lightfoot or Rahm Emanuel couldn’t be. This, indeed, is saying something; he’s a sort of ur-Mamdani without the charm or pragmatism, who — in his latest fit of abject economic illiteracy — wants to keep lockdown-era spending going while running a massive deficit. That’s led to a showdown over the city’s budget which Johnson seems determined to win even though voters think it’s insanity.
And while Chicago’s “wildly underfunded pensions” are part of an underlying economic malaise that’s stymied most modern mayors of the nation’s third-most populous city, Johnson’s unique lack of vision and belief that government should function as a charity of both corporations and individual taxpayers has The Washington Post’s editorial board, and even other state and local politicians, pushing back:
Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) proposes to offset a $1.15 billion shortfall by taxing the businesses that anchor Chicago’s economy, borrowing and more gimmicks.
The mayor proposes to increase the tax on the lease of “personal property” like computers, vehicles and software from 11 percent to 14 percent, and to bring back the city’s “head tax,” which would result in large employers paying $33 per worker, per month.
By making it more expensive to do business or hire workers in the city, these measures threaten Chicago’s future economic growth and tax collections. These moves are especially reckless given that the Chicago Fed’s 12-month hiring outlook is the weakest it’s been since the pandemic. Gov. JB Pritzker (D) says the head tax would penalize employment.
Advertisement - story continues belowOther gimmicks include a temporary hiring freeze that will do nothing to address the long-term mismatch between spending and revenue, diverting surplus funds earmarked for economic development of blighted areas into the general fund and the school system (once again sacrificing future growth to fund today’s expenditures), and slashing additional payments the city has been making to shore up the city’s underfunded pensions.
Because the voters of Chicago widely view the budget as the farce that it is, Chicago’s aldermen have refused to go down with Johnson’s ship and proposed an alternative that would jettison the borrowing and the head tax.
In the stead of those poisoned revenue-generators, they would raise taxes on booze, deliveries, and rideshares, in addition to increasing operating efficiencies and garbage collection fees. That last point seems to be a bridge too far for Johnson, who says he’ll veto any budget that raises the costs of refuse collection for residents.
But wait! There’s more budgetary insanity to be had:
As if that weren’t madness enough, city treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin announced in November that her office would no longer invest the city’s money in U.S. Treasuries. That would be rich if she was worried about risks posed by the nation’s soaring deficits and unsustainable debt levels. But nope. Conyears-Ervin is running for Congress and says this is a protest against President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian regime.”
She’s not just selling her country short, but her city. The purpose of the investment portfolio is to make money so that the city can cover its obligations, not to make political statements. The treasurer, like too many other Chicago politicians in the past, is treating the city’s money as an extension of her campaign fund, rather than the property of taxpayers.
Oh, you just noticed this, WaPo folk?
I’ve got to say, this closing sentence is the first (and I bet it’ll be the last) time I’ve seen these sentiments expressed in an editorial for our capital’s paper of record: “Unless politicians get serious, actually cut spending and start enacting sane, pro-growth policies, Chicago will get more than a taste of that bitter pill.” Ouch.
And the editorial board didn’t even deal with the biggest problems that Chicago faces, mind you.
For instance, take crime, the eternal bane of Windy City residents. The biggest outrage of 2025 on that front was the case of 50-year-old Lawrence Reed, the alleged CTA train attacker who set a young woman on fire last month while yelling “burn alive b****!” when he was arrested. Reed already had over 70 arrests to his record, including an aggravated battery charge in August.
Even though prosecutors warned the court that he was “a real and present threat” and that electronic monitoring was “wholly insufficient,” Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez said that “I can’t keep everybody in jail because the state’s attorney wants me to.” I guess she thought that maybe somewhere around arrest No. 65 he started having some remorse, but apparently not.
Mayor Johnson’s rebarbative response: “We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence,” he said at a media briefing. “We’ve already tried that, and we’ve ended up with the largest prison population in the world without solving the problems of crime and violence.”
Considering that Mr. Reed is still behind bars for the heinous crime he allegedly committed, neither the mayor nor the prison system seems to seriously believe that now, so I’m guessing he’s just trying to come up with a good excuse why the incorrigible lefty contingent in charge in Chicago believed it then, and why that toxic leniency didn’t contribute to the November crime even though anyone with brains knows it did.
It’s also worth noting where the resources that aren’t being spent on economic growth, pensions, or safety are being spent: on illegal immigrants and teachers unions, among other misplaced priorities.
Chicago has long been a sanctuary city, going back to a 1985 executive order by former Mayor Harold Washington (a Democrat, if you even needed to ask; every inept functionary here is) which forbade city employees from asking about immigration status.
Former Mayor Emanuel extended this with a 2012 program called the “Welcoming City Ordinance,” which not only granted additional protections to illegals but forced the police to cooperate with immigrant advocacy organizations. In 2021, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot decreed that police could not arrest or detain anyone for immigration status or immigration warrants, and forbade cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This has been taken to an absurd new level under Johnson, with public school students excused from class if they or their parents have any fear of being taken into custody by ICE. Your taxpayer resources at work, Chicago!
Then there’s also the “incredibly costly new contract with the Chicago Teachers Union” — as the Chicago Tribune put it earlier this year, noting that Johnson “forced out a highly competent schools chief who wouldn’t cow to his desire to borrow recklessly.”
When that union isn’t striking and/or racking up massive travel bills for dubious junkets, they’re pulling shenanigans like this, which make you think they’d be better off staying on the picket line and/or vacation:
“The children are always ours. Every single one of them. All over the globe.”
“Yes, we do [think your children are our children].” pic.twitter.com/ObfHpV2tRX
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) June 24, 2025
Wow. Not only do they erroneously think your children are theirs, but they probably overspent for the rights as well, this being Chicago.
So, yes, I’m practically enraptured that the WaPo crowd has figured out that Brandon Johnson and Co. are fiscally incontinent in a profound way. Now, if only they’ll figure out that what he’s spending that money on is terrible, too, and I’d be elated beyond words. Of course, they’d be beyond having a job at The Washington Post at that juncture, but a conservative can dream.
Until then, I’m just happy they forced Johnsonites in Chicago to go incognito for the next few weeks. Merry Christmas, and I hope the disguise doesn’t get too itchy.
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