Democrats chose the perfect place for their convention
Washington Examiner
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Last month, Chicago elected a new mayor who believes that his city’s high crime is the result of residents’ frustration over low corporate taxes. And no, this isn’t a put-on — he really said that.
“Seventy percent of large corporations in the state of Illinois did not pay a corporate tax,” Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson said after his narrow election win. “And it’s that kind of restraint on our budget that has caused the type of disinvestment that has led to poverty, of course, that has led to violence.”
GEORGIA DEMOCRATS BITTER OVER DNC SELECTION OF CHICAGO
We strongly doubt that anyone, upset that effective corporate taxes are too low and failing to receive enough government benefits, goes out to carjack someone — carjacking being the new preferred pastime of Chicagoans. But we do know that prosecutors and city governments that choose to let crime pay end up getting more of it — In Chicago’s case, a lot more of it.
This makes the Democrats’ choice of Chicago for their convention next August both curious and entirely fitting. When Democrats convene in Chicago next August, they will be showcasing a city where their party has had a complete lock on power for more than 90 years, in a state where Republicans are completely powerless and irrelevant and have been so for most of this century. In other words, Democrats have no excuses whatsoever for Chicago’s failures. Yet somehow, without any Republicans within arm’s reach to blame, those failures keep getting worse.
Chicago has long been known as and remains the most segregated city in America. It has a prosperous and relatively safe area that is completely white, and then there is everywhere else. Although it has been governed entirely for 90 years by a party that claims to care most about inequality, it is one of the most unequal places on Earth.
Chicago’s crime problem is off the charts compared to other, similarly large cities that have had a healthy injection of conservative governance recently to save them. That includes New York City, which benefited mightily from the administrations of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. (Despite his carelessness with his own money, Bloomberg was not an idiot mayor.) New York’s murder rate has, in recent memory, plunged below three per 100,000. Chicago’s was nearly 30 per 100,000 in 2021.
The Windy City has elected a “defund the police” radical at a time when its police force has shrunk by nearly 20% due to attrition. Murder was up 40% and theft up 33% over 2018 levels. Motor vehicle theft doubled year over year. Criminals who fail to contain their crimes to Chicago’s city limits pay the price because some of the prosecutors in other surrounding jurisdictions actually enforce the law and look out for public safety.
To circle back, Johnson’s assertion about low tax collections in Illinois causing crime illustrates just one more long-standing fallacy of Democratic governance. In the real world, the data show that you can raise tax rates as high as you like, but it will not result in a substantial amount of additional revenue in most cases, including that of the federal individual income tax.
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More crime, more inequality, more segregation. If you wanted to bring all the fallacies of liberalism and the Democratic Party together into one place, that place would be called Chicago. And that’s where Democrats are meeting.
How fitting.