A few hours before touching down in Chicago<\/a> Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris, in one of her few interactions with reporters<\/a> since snatching the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination from her boss, gave a meandering yet revealing answer to the simple question of how she would pay for her recently introduced economic proposals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“What we’re doing in terms of the [first-time homebuyer<\/a>] tax credits, we know that there’s a great return on investment,” Harris asserted<\/a> in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. “When we increase home ownership in America, what that means in terms of increasing the tax base, not to mention property tax base, what that does to fund schools\u2014again, return on investment. I think it’s a mistake for any person who talks about public policy to not critically evaluate how you measure the return on investment<\/em>. When you are strengthening neighborhoods, strengthening communities, and in particular the economies of those communities, and investing in a broad-based economy, everybody benefits, and it pays for itself in that way.”<\/p>\n

Italics added, to emphasize America’s ongoing mistakes.<\/p>\n

Democrats begin their four-day national convention Monday in the city that perhaps best exemplifies the chasm between their party’s dreamy policy rhetoric and grim real-world results. As a direct result of one-party misrule (there are zero Republicans<\/a> on the 50-seat City Council), Chicago’s tax base\u00a0is decreasing, not increasing. The population has declined for nine consecutive years<\/a>, is shrinking by an annual rate of 1 percent<\/a>, and is at its lowest point in more than a century<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Illinois, where Democrats control the governorship and a two-thirds majority<\/a> of the legislature, lost “an estimated $3.6 billion in income tax revenue in 2022 alone, a year the net loss of 87,000 residents subtracted $9.8 billion in adjusted gross income,” syndicated columnist and Illinois native<\/a> George Will observed<\/a> last week. “In the past six years,\u00a0$47.5 billion [adjusted gross income] has left….Illinois leads the nation\u00a0in net losses of households making 200,000 or more.”<\/p>\n

None of these or other grisly Windy City stats\u2014including the murders<\/a>\u00a0and the pension liabilities<\/a>\u2014are obscure. As Illinois Policy Institute Vice President Austin Berg<\/a>\u00a0put it Saturday night at a live taping<\/a> of the Fifth Column<\/em> podcast, “I believe Chicago is the greatest American city, and the worst-governed American city.”<\/p>\n

The bigger mystery has been why the Democratic Party would choose such a metaphorically dicey backdrop<\/a>. But an answer begins to suggest itself amid the banal dystopia<\/a> of the DNC’s endless security checkpoints, concrete barriers, and battalions of police officers separating America’s political class from its serfs. Democrats chose Chicago for a similar reason that Harris chose a running mate with a particularly awful record<\/a> during the pandemic- and riot<\/a>-scarred year of 2020: Because they, like their candidate, know that, contra Harris’ assertion Sunday in Pennsylvania, the people who talk about policy\u2014whether politician, journalist, or political consumer\u2014almost never “critically evaluate how you measure the return on investment.”<\/p>\n

If professional political conversation was tethered even loosely to policy results, you might expect one or maybe even two of the journalists dutifully collecting their DNC press credentials at the colossal (and colossally empty) McCormick Place<\/a> convention center to ask a follow-up question about what their eyeballs cannot miss. How in the world can a city in terminal financial crisis<\/a> not just support the country’s largest<\/a> convention-center complex during a time of market oversupply<\/a> and conventioneering decline<\/a>, but actually keep expanding<\/em> the damn thing?<\/p>\n

The DNC’s second major site (behind the United Center, which is hosting what you watch on television), “has been a political money pit for nearly 60 years,” Berg wrote<\/a> in 2019. Built<\/a> in 1960, rebuilt after a 1967 fire, then expanded in 1986, 1997, 2007, and 2017, McCormick Place looks this week like the cover of a Mike Davis book<\/a>\u2014extensive security barricades and fencing separating the nearby poors from a depopulated, dully corporate expanse.<\/p>\n

“Over and over, Chicago and Illinois public officials and a roster of consultants promised that a bigger McCormick Place would yield hundreds of thousands of new convention attendees and billions in new spending and public revenues,” Heywood Sanders wrote in his 2014 book Convention Center Follies<\/a><\/em>. “Those repeated promises have proved false, the consultant projections unmet.”<\/p>\n

Instead, like so many other Chicago governance failures, the unmet promises are covered over with taxes\u2014on hotel room stays, restaurants, car rentals. In completely related news, a 2024 Wallet Hub study<\/a> of effective state\/local tax burden per median U.S. household income ranked Illinois dead last.<\/p>\n

But the 2024 campaign is famously more about “vibes<\/a>” than anything related to governance. The Harris\/Walz campaign website<\/a> still does not have a policy page<\/a> (though the party did on Sunday release a draft platform<\/a>). “I have not had a single constituent in El Paso or a single person on the road try to get very specific policy details from me,” Harris campaign co-chair Rep. Veronica Escobar (D\u2013Texas) told<\/a> The New York Times<\/em>. You’re going to have to vote for a Harris administration to see what’s in it.<\/p>\n

Republican nominee Donald Trump famously did not even update the 2016 GOP platform<\/a> when he ran unsuccessfully in 2020, suggesting that America has a supply problem when it comes to national politicians and policy accountability.<\/p>\n

But don’t sleep on demand. Trump fans love his boorish, bizarre, and often funny jokes, so he keeps making cracks about Kamala Harris’ looks<\/a> and Montana Sen. John Tester’s fat stomach<\/a> rather than stay as focused on issues as his advisors would prefer<\/a>. Harris is getting cheered on by a subset<\/a> of journalists for not<\/em> subjecting herself to any kind of public cross-examination. And the residents of Chicago, looking upon both the civic dysfunction and the city’s undeniable energy and charm, just keep on voting for more Democrats.<\/p>\n

Americans may be getting precisely what they want out of politics in 2024. Good and hard.<\/p>\n

The post Democrats Unburdened by What They Have Done to Chicago<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is what you get when politics is untethered from governance. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105550"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}