Empire Building on our Backs

An empire building Mayor Daley proposes a crushing $5.9 billion budget. Tribune:

Mayor Richard Daley proposed a whopping $293 million increase in taxes, fees and fines Wednesday, including a 15 percent jump in Chicago's property-tax levy, among the biggest in the city's history.

If the City Council approves the plan, Daley will have raised property taxes more in this budget than he has in his previous 18 years in office combined. Until now, the mayor has liked to boast that since he was elected in 1989, he has limited property-tax increases to an average of about 1 percent a year.

But hey, what's one more tax among many?:

Daley's budget proposal comes at a time when other units of government are considering tax-increase proposals. The state, for example, is weighing a regional sales-tax increase to fund the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace as the Cook County Board considers its own sales-tax increase, a telecommunications-tax increase and two utility-tax increases. The Chicago Board of Education, meanwhile, already has approved a $74.2 million jump in its property-tax levy.

"I've never seen such a rush for money in the 15 years I have been doing this job," said Roper of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. "It has just been incredible. They all just say, 'I'm not the city,' and the city says, 'I am not the county,' and the county, 'I am not the state.'"

Building their patronage empires on our backs. Here comes the rise of the exurbs, the exodus from Illinois. I'm not your patsy. Just say no.

UPDATE: John Kass:

Chicago, how do you like your Duff Tax?

That's what you should call Mayor Richard Daley's proposed $108 million property tax increase -- part of his plan to increase taxes, fines and fees by $293 million -- which includes taxing bottled water.

The property tax increase covers what Chicago taxpayers paid the Duffs, the mayor's white-guy drinking buddies with Outfit connections whom Daley gave $100 million in city affirmative action cleaning contracts years ago, even though they weren't exactly black or female.

And Kass cites a memorable poem.

UPDATE: Tribune editorial:

The mayor seems to blame his workforce's wage and benefits increases for those higher costs. As if the increases in personnel costs that he approved were imposed on him by some unseen dictator.

Example: Daley recently inked contracts with 33 unions to provide raises for as many as 8,000 city workers. For 10 years! Imagine the new wage and pension burdens those contracts will create.