Chicago City Council parodies itself

From the Sun-Times:

Before they could agree to raising the [real estate transfer] tax from $7.50 to $10.50 per $1,000 of sale price, aldermen demanded that senior citizen home buyers would have to be exempt from the increase — and that active members of the military and disabled veterans join seniors in riding the CTA for free.

Aldermen also demanded that CTA pension funds in line for a $1.2 billion windfall diversify their roster of money managers.

Only six of the 43 existing financial advisers are minorities and they receive only a “small fraction” of pension funds invested, according to Finance Committee Chairman Edward M. Burke (14th).

“If Chicago taxpayers’ money is at risk here, the pension fund ought to do business, to the extent they can, with Chicago-based businesses. That’s where the jobs are provided. That’s where economic development occurs — not in New York or in Menlo Park, Calif.,” Burke said. “Giving $1.2 billion to the pension fund, which has a record of ignoring issues that we’ve been talking about here with our pension funds for years, is counterproductive.”

So they don't know how they are going to pay for new money for the CTA, but one of their solutions is to give away more free rides! This is too silly to comment further.

Then, they have a problem with CTA pension funding. One part of the solution has to be good investment returns (believe me, since I work in the field). You'd think they would say to hell with their affirmative action policies, we just need the best investment managers we can find. You'd be wrong.

See, when I rail against government-run programs it's because I know they will be run horribly inefficiently compared to the way private companies would do so. Private companies only care about making money, so they are ruthless in cutting costs and finding people who do good work for them.

The information in this article is a microcosm of it. When faced with a funding problem, the obvious solutions are to cut expenses or increase revenues. These guys want to increase revenues and expenses (only less than revenues).

The second part shows the other main problem with government programs, which is that politicians like to inject political considerations into everything. That's fine when it comes to a law against murder or whatnot. That's no so fine when the public's money that's being used to prop up a pension fund has to be managed by a certain number of black- and Chicago-owned business. That only leads to more inefficiency. I mean, maybe a black-owned business would do a great job. But if that's the case, why can't they compete on their own merits? It's not discrimination, since if they are good everybody will let them manage their money since (as mentioned above), all private compaies care about it making money.