Evansville’s Debt per capita will be over triple Chicago’s if all current spending is authorized

The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch tags Chicago as the fifth most heavily taxed city in the country: Its sky-high effective sales tax of 9.75 percent makes the tax burden on a family earning $25,000 a year the fourth highest in the country. From 1991, two years after Richard M. Daley first took office as mayor, to 2011, the year Emanuel took the reins, the average debt per Chicagoan grew from $600 to $2,600, an increase of 433 percent. As Dick Simpson, a former reform Chicago alderman who now teaches at the University of Illinois, put it: “There’s a significant downside to authoritarian rule. The city could do much better.”

As we reported this morning Evansville currently has debts of $360 Million that corresponds to $3,076 for every person in town. The mandatory repair of the sewers will take that to somewhere between $7,000 and $9,000 per person depending on the plan approved. The combination of the downtown convention hotel, the Johnson Controls deal, and Roberts Park will add roughly another $1,000 in debt per capita bringing Evansville’s debt per capita to about $10,000 when projects already on the wish list are funded.

In 2003 Evansville’s population was over 121,000 and its debt per capita was under $2,000. Today we have passed Chicago for per capita debt and are borrowing like the world is about to end. Chicago of course is famous across the globe for excessive spending and institutionalized corruption. We know how Chicago got to the point it is today. What is not fully understood is how a small town on the bend of the river dug a deeper hole than of per capita debt than Chicago. What is now a given is that an EPA mandate that surprised no one and was sourced in years of neglect will raise Evansville’s per capita debt to triple Chicago’s. The question is why given the depth of the hole Evansville is in do our leaders keep digging deeper by borrowing money to do non essential things?