Chi-Town set to follow Motor City

From Walter Russell Mead writing at The American Interest:

NYT: Chicago The Next Detroit
How much trouble is Chicago in? According to the New York Times front page this morning, this much trouble:

The pension fund for retired Chicago teachers stands at risk of collapse. The city�s four funds for other retired city workers are short by $19.5 billion. At least one of the funds is in peril of running out of money in less than a decade. And starting in 2015, the city will be required by the state to make far larger contributions to the funds, which could leave it hundreds of millions of dollars in the red�as much as it would cost to pay 4,300 police officers to patrol the streets for a year.

�This is kind of the dark cloud that�s coming ever closer,� Mr. Emanuel said in a recent interview, adding that he had no intention of raising his city�s property taxes by as much as 150 percent�the price tag, he says, that it might take to pay such bills. �That�s unacceptable.� [...]

This is what you get when you have years of Democratic and Union rule -- you run out of other people's money...