“Of course we are going to find the money.”

That was the response of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel last month, when asked how he was going to find the money to pay for the 970 additional police officers that his administration had pledged to hire over the next two years in response to an increase in violent crime in the city.

For months, Emanuel and other city officials had insisted that there was no money to cover contributions to the pensions of Chicago teachers or to fully fund public schools. The city was broke, they claimed. That lie was exposed when the city came up with a last-minute contract offer for teachers that included tens of millions of dollars taken from Emanuel’s “tax increment financing” surplus.