Cuts in Chicago
by Samuel Jones
18/08/09 Samuel Jones considers Chicago's drastic cost-cutting measures...
Yesterday, the City of Chicago announced that, in an effort to reduce a budget deficit of $300m (£184m) it will cut non-essential public services on three specific days. These ‘non-essentials’ are services like rubbish collections, libraries and health centres.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Temporary cuts of this sort raise important questions.
Is it more palatable to lose a service like refuse-collection temporarily rather than seeing incremental cuts across the board? If it means that everyone holds onto their rubbish for a day rather than some streets missing out for the foreseeable future, is that preferable?
It also raises the interesting possibility of assessing the hypothetical ‘what if such and such a service didn’t exist?’ Not having a service for a day offers the possibility of involving people in a debate about what could be cut on a more long-term basis and how. By giving people a taste of life with, say, a more limited refuse collection, it gives a genuine insight on what might be acceptable to live without and which 'non-essentials' we actually really value.