Timothy Birdnow

Here is how you kill a city.

Chicago Mayor Brandon wants an anaconda-like coiling of taxation around the city's business community, with surcharges on ride shares, on employees of all large corporations, etc. And, not getting the entire budget he wanted, he refused to sign it or veto it, making it open for "renegotiation" as he will simply add what he didn't get piecemeal over the next few years.

So typically liberal; he fights making the city safe (he isn't allowing overtime for cops or firefighters without city council approval, for instance) and at the same time raises taxes again. It never occurs to him that this chases businesses away; they will resettle in friendlier environments like Texas or Florida.

Liberals never get it; people choose where they live, and where they do business, and if you make it too expensive or unsafe they will choose a safer, less expsnsive area. There is a reason why cities like Nashville are growing by leaps and bounds; they offer what the big cities used to, without all the progressive b.s. and high taxes.

St. Louis went through this in the 1970's, after a quarter century of Democrat control the city was dwindling away and what had once been one of the greatest cities in America was becoming a shell, crime riddled and too expensive. There was a renaissance in the eighties just as there was in New York but that was short lived and now we are reaching the point where the city itself is not the largest city in Missouri, let alone in the midwest. (At t 279,695 people St. Louis is just a bit over HALF the size of her nearest competitor Kansas City, which sports 516,032 souls, although the metropolitan area is substantially larger.) That was caused by decades of Democrat dominance; you can't get elected dog catcher in St. Louis. The last Republican Mayor left office in 1948.

Which is why the city is rather desperate to merge with St. Louis County and become one massive metropolis; it's the only way to keep going with a disappeaing tax base. (St. Louis is it's own county, having seceded from St. Louis county in the late 19th century). It is crime riddled and increasingly impoverished. The north side is now so decimated there are whole blocks that are nothing but grasslands, all the buildings have been removed. And there are whole blocks where there are nothing but ruins, like Chichen Itza or some Mayan ruins in the jungles of Yucatan.

That's what happens; you run out of other people's money eventually.

St. Louis is still a large television market yet you never see it mentioned hardly at all on television because it's an embarassment to liberalism. (We are the tenth largest t.v. market). The only t.v. show I remember based in St. Louis was the John Larroquette show, which highlighted the degenerate and decaying nature of the place. Oh, we did appear in National Lampoon's Vacation as the city where the Griswolds got lost and had their hubcaps stolen by the locals. Maybe it's better we aren't mentioned much in media.

We lost the Football Cardinals, then the Rams. We've had multiple pro soccer teams that have moved away. We almost lost the Blues hockey team to Sasskatoon, for crying out loud! And the Redbirds are always talking about moving over to Illinois, or to St. Charles, because their home in downtown is unsafe and logistics are terrible there. Nobody wants to go downtown anymore, and rightly so.

This is what decades of people like Gov. Brandon running the show look like.

Chicago is in better shape than St. Louis because it is a major port city while St. Louis has nothing but rail lines and river traffic. But it will hollow out as surely as St. Louis did and for the very same reasons; you can't keep taking and not giving. It's like the story of the man who taught his horse to work without eating and then he beat the dead animal for being so ungrateful "I taught you to work without food and this is how you repay me!" I remember a number of yhears ago one of our mayors telling the media "it's not about what we can do for businesses but about what they can do for us". That kind of thinking leads to the death of a vibrant community.

Frankly, Chicago deserves to die as a leading city. It is nothing but an abomination now, and when all the businesses leave and all the good people leave and the city can't pay it's bills they will cry to the state and to the Federal government for help, but it will be all their own doing and they will be getting what they deserve. Of course, the people who voted the Democrats into office year after year will just move on to some new city and ruin it as thoroughly; they never learn.

At any rate I suspect Chicago will start slipping in population and eventually wind up a mediocre city in a poor state. The only hope Illinois has is to kick Chicago out. Maybe it can join Wisconsin, or even leave the U.S. entirely and become a Canadian city? Any way you slice it they have long dominated Illinois and the Land of Lincoln will go down with it.

If Southern Illinois wants to leave the state and join Missouri I would welcome them with open arms. While not exactly Texas it is more like Indiana than the north part of Illinois, and THAT would be a fine addition to the Show Me state. I'd love to get the Illinois Ozarks and Little Egypt (Southernmost Illinois where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers converge) into our fair state. Cathy and I used to go to the Illinois Ozarks regulary for vacation; they were beautiful and the best kept secret in the Midwest! But I hated giving money to the socialists in Springfield and Chicago.

My prediction is in twenty years Chicago will be just another bombed out Democrat city and nobody will have any interest in moving there. It is a well deserved ending for the corrupt and criminal enterprise on Lake Michigan.

BTW St. Louis invented thin crust pizza, not Chicago, who tries to usurp our very unique style of the popular Italian dish. They should stick to their ridiculous stretch-your-mouth deep dish pizza and stop trying to lay claim to our stuff here!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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