Feb. 04--You wonder how it happens?
How a state or a city or a school system can find itself facing ruinous, incomprehensibly large debts? How elected and appointed officials can have allowed a problem to turn into a crisis, to turn into an emergency?
Well, you're seeing how this week.
Chicago Public Schools -- with talk of bankruptcy, massive layoffs and even a state takeover in the air -- borrowed $725 million just to keep the doors open and the lights on.
Part of the loan is due in 10 years, the rest in 28 years. Because of the high interest rates CPS had to agree to, city taxpayers will end up paying the lenders about $1.8 billion over the lives of the loans.
Officials defended the move as the best among a bad set of options. Which it may be. The financial collapse of the schools would be almost unthinkably bad, and a loan, no matter how horrible its implications for next year and beyond, is almost certainly better for this year.
But going back decades, all the moves that put the system into the hole of which it is now trying to claw out -- including the pension holidays, the contract sweeteners, the program expansions, the refusal to raise taxes and the operation of vastly underused schools -- were sold to the public as the best among a set of bad options.
It's easy to look back in anger and disgust at those who refused to make the tough choices, to operate within their means, to plan for the next decade instead of just the next semester.
Why did they follow the path of least resistance? Why did they eat their seed corn? Why did they assume good times would never end and that better times were coming?
Just like it will be easy, a few years from now, for city residents to look back at February 2016 and wonder why they let Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his hand-picked schools CEO Forrest Claypool saddle them with all that new debt without having a clear plan on how to get out of it.
Why weren't revenues and expenses forced into alignment? Why are we so averse to the necessary pain, to the sacrifices required to stanch the flow of red ink?
Because all of us -- pols, bureaucrats and citizens -- are addicted to magical thinking.
Someone, somehow, someday will come up with that $1.8 billion!
And that's how it happens.
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