A Key Reason Politicians Get Away With This

Politicians get away with fiscal irresponsibility all the time. Sure, we all complain about it when we run up against so-called "pork" in legislation. We all chuckle at the ridiculous rules and regulations that cost the taxpayer money and inconvenience. But in the end, we're the ones who let them get away with fiscal irresponsibility. Here's a good example:

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." 

First, let's put Mr. Emanuel's comments into some context here: the guy who stepped in as mayor can always claim he had nothing to do with previous irresponsible decisions. So it's easy for him to say it's "unacceptable." Somehow I doubt that had he been overseeing these pension funds in the past, things would have been materially different. How do I know that? I know it because politicians make promises in order to either gain power or retain power, and they never - NEVER - consider the consequences.

You really should burn this simple fact into your brain. Oh, you know this? Then the next question would be: Do you act on it? I suspect not. How do I know? A comment later in this same article expresses this point thusly:

"Voters don't care about pensions as an abstract issue," said Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman and political scientist. "What they care about are the effects over the next two years of having to cut services or raise taxes to pay for this."

While I don't necessarily subscribe to his analysis here, it does point out that a big part of the problem is US. We the People allow politicians to get away with their chicanery all the time. And we do this because we focus strictly on ourselves - the services government provides to US, the taxes they levy on US - and hardly consider the common good. So as long as politicians keep turning back to us and placating us by preserving or increasing the services government provides, or occasionally - in grand style - providing a little tax relief from time to time, we're satisfied. We no longer care that their promises cannot be kept and will only lead to crises in the future. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that many of us don't even care if those crises fall on the shoulders of our own children: witness those infamous government programs, Social Security and Medicare, neither of which are sustainable at current benefit levels and tax rates.

Politicians know just how to manipulate us and we let them do it.