Basement Whatever

In the 1970s,  the big question was why was Chicago so fiscally well run. There’s a wonderful book by political scientist Ester Fuchs called Mayors and Money. Why did New York go bankrupt when Chicago didn’t? The answer she gives is that in New York, the political machine died, and the result was no centralizing function: they gave money to everybody. Whereas in Chicago, people were either for or against the Daley machine. That machine had an incentive not to get into a lot of fiscal trouble, because if it did, it would be punished politically.
— Read on www.statecraft.pub/p/should-the-feds-bail-out-chicago