Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has published her 2019-2020 budget. It’s not good. It tries to squeeze even more blood out of the stone that is Chicago’s tax base. And it asks the dwindling ranks of Illinois taxpayers to pay even more to help Chicago out of its fiscal mess. Worst of all, this budget does those things despite utterly failing to address Chicago’s deep structural budget deficits.
So what does Lightfoot want to do?
Well, seeing as Chicagoans are already taxed up to their eyeballs via income and property charges, Lightfoot is relying on an array of stealth taxes to close the city’s projected $838 million deficit. Unwilling to engage in the kind of government shrinkage that is necessary to put Chicago back in the black, Lightfoot wants to triple city taxes on Uber and Lyft rides. Lightfoot also wants to charge diners at restaurants and bars an effective sales tax rate of 11.5%.
It won’t work.
The key problem in Chicago, as in Illinois generally, is that powerful unions have imposed impossible costs on taxpayers. Beholden to these union-special interests, politicians are unwilling to confront the source of their fiscal nightmare. As the Illinois Policy Institute observes, Chicago’s pension crisis is such that just 35% of its long-term obligations are covered.
But it gets worse. The degree of union dominance over Chicago’s notoriously corrupt politics is such that the unions aren’t even satisfied with the mess they’ve already constructed. Take Chicago’s teachers union, for example. Despite having one of the most generous benefits programs of any union anywhere on Earth — perhaps even in the universe — the union is back on the streets extorting families with school-age kids to get even more. As with the United Automobile Workers Union, the teachers union should be crushed. Instead, Lightfoot will yield.
And so even as Chicago remains afflicted by violent crime, so too will it remain buried in insurmountable debt. There is a warning here for taxpayers across the nation: Beware Democrats bearing gifts. When the bill comes due, the pain is great.
