Aren't Chicago taxes high enough?

Sometimes I wonder why taxes are so much higher in big cities than in smaller ones. Is it the need for an increased police presence due to more crime? That plays a part. Is it the need to pay prevailing wages for any work that is being done? Undoubtedly, that's also a part.

Here's another one, though, that would be much easier to fix if only the city council wasn't comprised completely of liberal to left-wing Democrats: the stupid spending programs. Why does our city need this when others don't?

The plan calls for City Hall to expand an emergency rental assistance program to support up to three months of rent and moving expenses for eligible tenants evicted after a landlord’s foreclosure.

Pro-bono legal services provided to evicted tenants by the Lawyer’s Committee for Better Housing will be expanded. And the city is prepared to launch a tenant outreach program as soon as Gov. Blagojevich signs a bill on his desk that broadens the umbrella of protections for impacted renters.

Awesome. They keep raising taxes to pay for this crap and then they wonder why they get a budget shortfall (hint: people do whatever they can to avoid the taxes). Then just just raise them more and more. The city needs this new program exactly why? Especially with this $400 million budget hole this year!

The comments at the bottom of the article give me some hope, as I see that I'm not the only one who has the same reaction to news like this.

This is why everyone hates hipsters

East Pilsen is one of those crappy Chicago neighborhoods that is turning into a hipster/artist area. Of course, the next step is then normal white people moving in and the neighborhood turning less crappy. The hipsters don't like it.

(As an aside, this final step is happening in my hood, Logan Square. Read the comment on our new bar by "abeline_queen" to get a flavor for how they view such nice, normal places. What a bitch. Here is the full text of an e-mail I sent to someone about her comment:

I mean, I know it's a comment section for rating the bar, but her beef isn't with the bar. It's with the very idea of an improving neighborhood. She hated this place before she ever stepped in it, and I doubt she ever did that.

If she thinks it's a Wrigleyville-style bar, she has clearly not been in there and thus is lying by reviewing it. The place is not ever very much fun (for now) because it's all couples going there to eat and then leave. It may as well be a Flat Top Grill.

Finally, how much individuality is there in dive bars and burrito places (of which there is only one of the "all-night" variety, and that's really just a regular Mexican restaurant that happens to be open 24 hours. Believe me, I've looked)? I've been to plenty of those places, too, and they are all the same. Because they suck. The dive bars are full of old people and dopey hipsters and in the burrito places you are lucky if someone can take your order since no one knows English. She must be one of those weird ugly hippie types who used to get made fun of when she was younger and never matured past it like most people do. I can just imagine her walking by the bar thinking how it's full of "frat guys" or some other supposed enemies.

Maybe I need to write a review responding to hers since she's so blatantly dishonest in her review. Overall, she just wants the relative safety of a nicer neighborhood (meaning full of white people) while continuing to reap the supposed benefits of bad ones ("character" and such). You can't have it both ways, sister!)

The latest manifestation is over a polish sausage stand in East Pilsen. I'm not kidding:

"This is a threat, not an opportunity for our neighborhood," says Carlos Chavarria, who owns Kristoffer's Cafe and Bakery on Halsted.

Why does a restaurant that serves up such beloved Chicago fare -- succulent grilled sausage topped with charred onions and sport peppers, a dollop of mustard on a bun -- elicit such a negative reaction?

"Have you been there?" asks Michael Berg, co-owner of EP Theater Company. "I go there for late night food once every two months. It's a place were drunk people who get out of bars at 2 a.m. go to eat and yell at each other. That's not what where looking for here."

Then there's the traffic jams and litter and overflowing Dumpsters, not to mention the rodents, graffiti, prostitution and double-parked cars, Chavarria says.

Huh? It's a sausage stand, not a casino!

This is what happens when you combine the modern nanny-statism of modern Chicago politics and liberalism in general with idiotic hipsters. What about the free market? Does anyone care about that any more?

I will say that the comments at the bottom of the story are really something. They range from the scary:

They should close down all of those Maxwell Street Depot stands. The food is bad for your health. If you ever see how they grill onions, they pour melted lard over a pile of onions on the grill. When they make the sausage putting the onions on top, you can see the bun soaking up the lard. Imagine what lard can do to you. It can cause harding of the arteries and that's bad for your heart. (Really? Who is "they"? You want the government to shut down restaurants because the food might be bad for you?)

...to the accurate:

Uneducated hipster losers are part of Podmajersky's plan for the neighborhood? Wow, that's forward-looking. (Ed: Ha!)Hey Pilsen, this housing/foreclosure crisis pretty much guarantees that you can keep your gangbangers for another 10 years. I feel sorry for the yuppies who paid over 300k prior to the crash for a 2 bed 2 bath.

...and...

Gee, I would bet if the Polish Stand was going to include lattes, frapuchinos, and fries made in duck fat, there would be no protest. (Ed: Double ha!) What a joke. Welcome ot Chicago. The city and citizens who hate businesses.

...to the funny:

i have an idea, why dont we have those people who hate the dog stand idea to have a polish eating contest so they can have a heart attack and die to solve our problems

...and...

Ya I always grab a polish and a trick from the polish stand.

Reason ranks the 35 biggest cities by freedom

Guess which city comes in last in personal freedom? If you don't know, you are new to this blog. How about this apalling part:

Shortly after taking office in 1989, Mayor Richard Daley blew the dust off an ancient ordinance allowing individual city precincts to vote themselves dry. Today, nearly one quarter of Chicago’s precincts are alcohol-free; the number of Chicago taverns has dropped from some 7,000 in the late 1940s to just over 1,300 today.

And here you thought it was just selective posting by me

Welcome to Chicago, the large US city with the most paternalistic government. This is completely unsurprising, since the city council is just a bunch of busybodies, as I've documented over and over again:

Chicago reigns supreme when it comes to treating its citizens like children (Las Vegas topped our rankings as America's freest city). Chicagoans pay the second-highest cigarette tax in the country, and the sixth-highest tax on alcohol. Chicago has more traffic-light cameras than any city in America (despite studies questioning their effectiveness), restricts cell phone use while driving, and it's quickly moving toward a creepy public surveillance system similar to London's.

Surprise, surprise

Everybody remember the famous new 5 cent per bottle of water Chicago tax? It's a real shocker, but money is coming in at less than half of projections.

Two posts in one day about how so many Democrats don't understand economics? Today's news is a veritable goldmine:

David Vite, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, responded by essentially saying, "I told you so."

Vite predicted the tax would fall far short as Chicagoans fled to the suburbs to buy cases of bottled water, along with the rest of their groceries.

"Single-bottle sales have not been dramatically hurt. It's the bulk purchase, the six-pack and the case that has just been killed. There's no reason someone is gonna pay $1.20 extra for a $4 dollar case of water when they can go to the suburbs to buy it without that," Vite said.

So when you tax something, you get less of it (in this case, bottled water purchases)? Revolutionary! If only there were people out there who understand such phenomena and implement it into their political philosophy...

By the way, I just noticed the comments at the bottom of the article. It's full of the usual stuff like, "When will these guys stop taxing everything?" Are people this stupid? When you elect an entire city council of liberal Democrats, you are going to have liberal governance! That means high taxes and spending, and you will also have high rates of nanny-state-ism such as the smoking and foe gras bans. Why not mobilize and vote some of them out? A real shocker would be to start electing conservative Republicans, but that will never happen because to too many people in the city think they are "mean". Yeah, well, how "nice" is it to tax the crap out of everything just to piss the money away on the Olympics?

I just wish people who vote for certain candidates would understand what they are getting. If you vote Democratic, this is what you will get. If you are fine with that, then that's OK. Just don't complain afterwards when the guys you vote in do exactly what anyone who follows politics at all could figure out they would do. At that point, you are just being dumb.

Chicago drivers are complete and utter a-holes

In other news, the sun came up today.

Here's the set-up:

It was a true Chicago moment. Amid the taquerias and Polish sausage shops and fortune teller storefronts and factories, a lone undercover officer took his life in his hands Monday.

No, he wasn't working narcotics. He simply stepped out onto Belmont Avenue.

The goal: see if people would stop for him in the crosswalk.

The result: 101 drivers were pulled over -- and received warnings -- in less than two hours.

This piece of human garbage wins the award for being a lying jerk in about three different ways:

One highlight: the Blazer driver with a handicapped sign who shouted: "Get out of the street!"

He changed his tune by the time police stopped him down the block, officers said.

"No speak English," he said.

Just say no, IOC

Chicago is one of the four finalists to host the 2016 Olympics. I couldn't be more cranky.

First, our taxes are high enough! This will just lead to more and more as the city will have to piss away money on all kinds of spending initiatives. And do the Olympics ever make money? No, they always cost far more than is projected and lose money, unless Mayor Daley hires Mitt Romney to run them. As if he would ever hire an extremely competent Republican with a great track record when he could instead hire one of political machine cronies to screw it up.

Second, if I am still living anywhere near the city, I don't want thousands of stupid foreigners running around. They are just going to clog everything up with their odd customs and practices.

Third, what's the point, other than Daley's giant ego? We already have a good city, and we don't need to host the Olympics to prove it. If people around the world don't think much of us, who cares? They are the ones living in third-world stinkholes.

A small step towards sanity for the Chicago City Council

As much as I like to hammer on the nanny-staters in the Chicago City Council, I should give them credit when they deserve it. Yesterday they repealed the city's ban on foie gras, which is some kind of fancy food, being served in restaurants. You could still always buy it at the store and cook it home. I had never heard of it before the ban (as I imagine is the case with most Chicagoans), but for some reason Alderman Joe Moore thought it was important enough to pass the ban a couple of years ago. That, of course, made our city a laughingstock. I mean, it's FOOD.

Apparently there were some protocols that were violated to get the repeal through, but I don't care. The right thing was done, and it's not like the city council is known for staunch constitutional principles. What I do know is that Moore is PISSED:

When Moore tried to debate the merits, Daley ruled that the measure was not debatable. He ordered the clerk to call the roll and to continue, even as Moore shouted for the right to be heard.

"If it can happen to me, tomorrow it could happen to you," Moore warned his colleagues.

"Thank you, Ald. Joe ‘Foie Gras’ Moore," Daley said.

After the show of force, Moore denounced the mayor as a dictator and Wednesday’s meeting as a new low.

"Even in the ugliest days of one-man rule, members of the City Council still had the opportunity to ... state their case. For the mayor to fail to recognize me to debate the merits of this issue was the height of arrogance," Moore said.

"The city had placed its mark as a city of compassion, a city that was standing up against [animal] cruelty and it’s taken a giant step backward. But, it’s also taken a giant step backward in ... good old fashioned democracy. ... There was no reason that this issue had to be ramrodded through today," Moore said.

The animal rights crankss are also unhappy, but that just tells me that this was the right thing to do:

Julie Janovsky, a spokesperson for the animal protection group Farm Sanctuary, argued that the foie gras ban had "massive public support" and that the City Council’s repeal "effectively endorsed animal cruelty."

"Chicagoans were proud to live in a city that took a stand for humanity. To reverse a compassionate and admirable decision under pressure from political bullies and special interests shows a cowardly brand of cynicism unlike any we have seen in our efforts to give voice to the most vulnerable beings in society -- animals raised for food," Janovsky said.

Yeah, that's exactly what this repeal did did. Next thing you know they will pass a resolution praising Michael Vick. And a goose or duck is not quite the most vulnerable being in our society (how about babies?), since many of them are killed anyway for food.

I've never eaten it before, but now I want to have some the next time I'm in a fancy joint just to shove it up these animal rights dorks' asses.

The city's bicycle beaurocracy

I agree with the point of the city in this article (that cyclists ride around like maniacs when they are supposed to follow the rules of the road), but do we need another layer of beaurocracy to fix the problem?

The city’s Bike 2015 Plan calls for new regulations against the city’s 300 bicycle messengers, who make 1.1 million deliveries each year.

They would be required to wear helmets and complete a city training session. Companies would be advised when messengers get tickets.

“I may have the pleasure of coming back to this committee again with an ordinance specifically related” to bike messengers, said Ben Gomberg, bike program coordinator for the Department of Transportation.

Gomberg said bicycle licensing has been studied and rejected in other cities as “administratively too difficult.” But, he promised a summer crackdown to create a “level playing field.”

Because trendiness comes out of government beaurocracy

I'm sure this will work very well. Apparently the city government has set up some lame and unnecessary department (more tax dollars down the drain...) to help make Chicago, well, read on:

Six local fashion designers have been chosen to be the first to occupy the Chicago Fashion Incubator at Macy’s on State Street.

The incubator, set to open in March on Macy’s 11th floor, is part of Mayor Richard Daley’s efforts to turn the Windy City into the Trendy City, known as much for its fashion as its residents’ remarkably unfashionable winter garb.

The mayor and business leaders want to give local designers a reason to stay in Chicago rather than going to New York or Los Angeles. “This is another important step toward developing the next generation of design talent in our city,” said Mayor Richard Daley in a statement.

I don't really give a rip if Chicago becomes a fashion center. I do, however, know it won't happen because the people who bring you the CTA, the Chicago Housing Authority, and every other wasteful beaurocracy run by the city are in charge of it.

Chicago running out of money to remove snow

Yep, due to the higher-than-expected amount of snow we've received so far in 2008, the city has already used $14 million of its $18 million budgeted for the whole calendar year. There is lots of gnashing of teeth of how more will be paid for.

This is like an SNL skit. $18 million is nothing in the scheme of the whole budget. This is one of the few things the city provides that actually benefits everyone who lives and works here, and they might not have the money for it?

How big is the budget? I was blown away. It's $5.9 billion. This story cranks me off so much that I spent a few minutes poring over the budget, which you can do here.

For example, here's $1,132,000 that is going to be spent with absolutely no good definition whatsoever. This is the line item in the budget:

"For general assisstance to persons in need thereof, residing within the city of Chicago, and expenditures for the administration thereof."

What could that even mean? Why is that the city's job, whatever it is?

Alderman Burke was on fire yesterday

We must be back in the Chicago City Council silly season, which is good for me because I am getting tired of railing against John McCain.

Clearly, these guys have nothing left to do. Maybe they could just become citizen-legislators and meet for one month out of the year:

Chicago retailers would be required to install plastic bag recycling bins—and distribute bags that state, “Please reuse or recycle at participating store”—under an ordinance proposed Monday that would follow New York City’s lead.

Whether this is a good idea or not, why is it the government's job to force stores to do it?

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.

Smoking ban claims its first victim

The Chicago violation under Illinois' draconian law is a craphole near my house. As an aside, the "two-way" in the title refers to the fact that it is contained between Fullerton and Milwaukee (which is at a 45 degree angle), and there are entrances and exits facing both streets.

Anway, they send around inspectors to enforce this nanny-statism? Nauseating.

What has the American Left become?

Why, they can't handle people who get an apartment paid for by the government working 20 hours a week.

Here's the proposal. Note that the board member who is proposing this lives in public housing herself:

Adult public housing residents would eventually be required to work at least 20 hours a week or face eviction, under an unprecedented sweeping policy the Chicago Housing Authority is poised to approve.

"I feel all these things are in place for the betterment of the residents," said Mary Wiggins, a member of the CHA board and its Tenant Services Committee.

Wiggins, also a public housing resident, continued: "If there's no good reason for them [residents] not to work, they shouldn't be there."

Not too tough, huh, since these people apparently don't even have to work right now to live basically for free? If you think so, you haven't been following politics very closely over the past, say, 40 YEARS:

Housing advocates have described the eviction threat as "draconian"

"There is a real specter of homelessness," said Bill Wilen, director of housing litigation for the Chicago-based Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. "Traditional public housing is thought of as the housing of last resort for people who can't make it in mixed housing. . .There needs to be housing for families that can't live elsewhere."

This Wilen fella is off his rocker, basically. If someone would rather be homeless than work 20 hours per week (that's less than 3 days!), then that's fine with me. Some of these people have been leeching off of the productive taxpayers for years.

Also, if people can't live anywhere but the projects, what does that say about them? Don't they have any personal responsibility? They aren't children, but the left (and to a lesser extent liberals and the Democratic party) seem to think they practically are.

Wiggins lives in the projects, and she sees first-hand how destructive the free ride is on people's spirit. Do you think Wilen knows anything about that? I'm going to guess that he lives in a very fancy neighborhood that isn't anywhere close to a housing project. Maybe he should talk to my sister, who lived near one for a few years. Her condo garage was constantly being broken into and things were being stolen and vandalized by these a-holes. But hey, the status quo is just fine, right?

The city budget passed

No curbside recycling or 50 extra cops, but everything else is there on the tax side (except for 1/3 of the original property tax increase and half the bottled water tax). The mayor is a bit cranky:

He called the aldermen who had the courage to support him "weight lifters" for their willingness to do the political "heavy lifting." And he ridiculed those who had the hypocrisy to vote "yes" on a budget that included a $104,101-a-year aldermanic salary and a $40,000 hike in the annual aldermanic expense allowance and "no" on the property tax increase needed to finance it.

...

"It's heavy lifting. They don't want to get blamed for it. They want their salary increases. They want this. They want that. But, [they also want to] go home and tell their people, 'I voted against this,'....Everybody's running for something....They're all positioning themselves," Daley said.

"You have to make a decision. It's a tough decision. Do you think I want to raise taxes?...[But], no one wanted a layoff. When you talked about layoffs, I don't think you got five votes...What about shutting hours down in the libraries? Oh, we can't do that. Why not? You want to privatize all Streets and San? Oh, we can't. No one wanted to make the tough decisions. But, it was the easy decision to vote 'no.' "

They get an additional $40,000 a year in expenses? Jeepers, that's not cool. Still, that's only $2 million extra compared to the tax increases of $276.5 million.

Alderman Joe Moore is my new hero on the city council:

Ald. Joe Moore (49th) was a consistent "no" across the board, citing the "constant drumbeat of criminal indictments and convictions" at Daley's City Hall.

"How many bottles of water must be sold to pay for the $12 million fund created to compensate victims of the city's rigged hiring system?....How many sewer and water fees must be paid to cover the cost of fraudulent minority contracts awarded to politically connected, white-owned businesses? How many red-light runners must be caught on camera to make up for the $40 million-a-year that was spent for do-nothing Hired Trucks," Moore said, during a debate that dragged on for nearly two hours.

I'll close with my usual refrain that people are no doubt tired of reading:

The property tax increase to build and maintain libraries has become the flashpoint for a taxpayer rebellion made worse by County Board President Todd Stroger's $880 million tax hike request.

Taxpayer rebellion? Not quite. When we see some turnover in the city council after an election focused on taxes, I'll believe it. Until then, we're not exactly in the middle of the Boston Tea Party.

What's up in Chicago and Cook County?

Intrepid readers of this site may wonder why I haven't been posting any updates on the ridiculous budget battles (such as they are) for the governments of the city of Chicago and Cook County. The reason is that nothing is happening, as far as I can tell.

I use the Sun-Times almost exclusively for news updates, and they haven't had anything lately. Either they are too involved covering the guy who obviously killed his last two wives or budget work hasn't been going on.

LO AND BEHOLD, as I went to the Sun-Times site for a general link above, there is some news for the city today. It's really nothing special or interesting, except that we seem to be getting closer to a resolution of the budget negotiations. I'll just repeat that when a bunch of big-spending nany-staters control the local government, this is what you get. There is never any mention of cutting taxes that are too high on everything, and cutting spending is absurd to them. I hope everyone enjoys their new libraries.

The Leviathan grows unabated...

11/1/07 CTA and city budget updates

Some of the high school kids who have been glomming off those silly bus routes are angry. Good thing they can't vote! (Ha!) They are probably illegal immigrants and they'll never be able to, anyway.

In city budget news, the Mayor is apparently cranky about not getting his property tax increase. Why would I say that? Because he decided to pull out of his budget the only new spending items that people actually want:

Mayor Daley today postponed what few sweeteners there were in his 2008 budget — hiring 50 police officers and expanding curbside recycling to 131,000 more households — to pave the way for rolling back his proposed, $108 million property tax hike.

Thanks Mayor Daley! Good thing we'll still have new libraries to look at as they get vandalized due to not enough cops.

As a postscript, I don't want curbside recycling since that's hippie stuff. My point was that lots of people do, and since it's one of the less egregious new programs the city has devised recently I don't get very cranky about it.

10/31/07 CTA and county news update

Now the city is going to take desk-duty cops and have them hang around schools that will be most affected by the elimination of certain bus routes. That's a good idea, in as much as it has the police actually working to reduce the influence of gangs in bad areas. Gee, Mr. Mayor, what a brilliant idea!

Meanwhile, the county government is up to its usual shenanigans in hiring. It's the usual wasteful patronage stuff that won't go away until voters realize that a Stroger may not be the best guy to run the county. I'm not holding my breath since blacks here vote so monolithically.

UPDATE: How could I miss this the first time around? Here's the usual extreme sob story of the day, courtesy of intrepid Sun-Times reportes Ben Goldberger. Apparently, someone who lives in THE SUBURBS is going to be affected my CTA cuts and fare increases. Gee, no kidding. Here's the good stuff:

By the time he returns home at the end of the day, Riggins, a married 20-year-old with no car and a full-time job, has transferred at least four times -- and spent nearly $10. And that's just when he's stationed at a West Side hospital. Some days he's assigned to jobs in Oak Park, Orland Park, Melrose Park, Tinley Park, Cicero or the Loop. Mass transit is the only way he has to get to any of them.

"It's costing me a pretty penny, costing me too much," Riggins said Tuesday. And as someone wholly dependent on the CTA, Riggins says the doomsday fare increases scheduled to take effect Sunday put a tight squeeze on an already limited budget.

"I'm going to have to stop doing everything I used to do for fun. If I want to eat, that's out of the question right now. It's costing me too much. Something's really got to change."

"This is a big part of my life," Riggins said of the CTA, "and I'm mad at the governor for not getting down there and signing that bill. He had plenty of time, and they say if he doesn't get it signed by January it's going to get even worse. And with winter coming, man."

Now what's not mentioned in the story? How about this: why doesn't he have a car? Has he had a bunch of DUI's or does he blow all his money on fancy stuff? Who knows? I'm guessing it's not because the car fairy hasn't yet left one under his pillow yet like she's done for everyone else.

So an extra $2 to $4 a day is going to cut out all of his fun money? This also isn't questioned, but rather it's taken for granted to be true. I don't believe it. Even granting that it would be true, this guy has clearly made some terrible life choices to even be in this position. I don't have a lot of sympathy for him.

The real problem is that he's allowed himself to become so dependent on cheap, publicly subsidized transportation. That's NOT a reason for forcing taxpayers all over the state to prop up a wasteful beaurocracy.

10/30/07 updates on county and city government

We've had a lull lately in our local governments and their budget battles, but it appears that each Cook County Commissioner gets a 27% increase for his office:

Commissioner Tim Schneider said he never asked for, nor will he take, the $90,000 in extra salaries Stroger is offering his office, saying the county's "in dire straits" and the board should "keep county government at the most efficient level we can" by giving back extra money.

Commissioner Joan Murphy said "maybe [Schneider] doesn't do the amount of work the rest of us do."

"Feel free, if you want, to give yours back, but I'm keeping mine," she said.

Murphy later apologized to Schneider for the verbal attack.

This perfectly sums up the attitude of these guys. Keep in mind this isn't an increase to actually provide more county services (such as they are). They are only to fund commissioner offices and staff. I realize that Murphy apologized (and thus it's not really fair to pick on her for her comments), but the idea that a fellow commissioner wants to save money for taxpayers means he's not doing as much work is infuriating. The only work I see any of them doing anyway is spending and taxing, so maybe a little less of that "work" would be good thing.

Meanwhile, it's not the city budget that's in the news, but the CTA. Yes, yes, the threatening cuts are on the way. Blah, blah. The vast majority of riders are completely unaffected. You know what bus routes are being cut? The goofy, circuitous routes that only run at rush hour or during special events for the benefit of a few people. The sob stories ring pretty hollow:

Daley used Mather High School, 5835 N. Lincoln Ave., as the backdrop for a news conference called to "put a face on" the 39 bus routes on the chopping block.

One of those routes, the No. 93 California, runs right past Mather. If the route is eliminated, junior Christina Correa and hundreds of her classmates will be forced to walk in the dark to Western four blocks away or to Kimball six blocks from their high school.

California and Western are exactly one-half mile from each other. I walk further than a half mile EVERY DAY I take the Blue Line from my house. So do a lot of people, and then think of those who walk even further. And yes, it gets dark and we all have to deal with it. Buck up, kids, and walk with friends. Geez, if there are hundreds of you who do it you won't have any trouble finding some people to walk with you!

Apparently there's also the issue of putting a casino downtown to help fund the city's budget. Anybody who thinks this is a good idea should walk around Las Vegas some time. I don't mean on the Strip, but off of it or downtown (off of Fremont). As much as I love Vegas, those casinos bring with them many problems. Think there's already too much crime and homelessness in Chicago now? Just wait until that thing opens up. It's not worth having easy, quick access to a blackjack table after work.

The riverboats tend to isolate themselves from it to an extent, but even those cities have problems from the boats.