This column was updated and corrected to reflect that the $12 billion plan is of both supposed savings along with tax increases.
By: Mark Glennon*
Two Chicago interest groups that are major allies of Mayor Brandon Johnson published Wednesday what they want Johnson to pursue for new taxes: a city income tax, a wealth tax, a “head tax” assessed per worker on employers, a digital ad tax, a jump in the tax on jet fuel used at Chicago’s airports, a progressive increase on real estate transaction fees on sales over $1 million. The new taxes would total $6.8 billion according to the plan, and would be coupled with supposed savings of $5.1 billion that would be redirected to other spending, totaling nearly $12 billion.
For a little perspective, the tax increase would be even bigger than Chicago’s near-$5 billion Corporate Fund, the main operating account in the city’s budget.
You gotta hand it to today’s left when it comes to the path to power. The title on their proposal is “First We Get the Money: $12 billion to fund a just Chicago,” echoing the wisdom in a famous line in the movie Scarface, “First you get the money, then you get the power….”
That formula has worked well for the Chicago Teachers Union and its close allies, the Action Center on Race & The Economy and the People’s Unity Platform, which sponsored the new proposal. The CTU, Johnson’s former employer, was his biggest campaign donor, using funds questionably squeezed from its members. Its mastery of money and power is unquestioned, also extracting oversized pensions and nearly $30,000 per student for its schools.
The proposal is co-written by Saqib Bhatti, a member of Johnson’s transition team and co-executive director of ACRE, one of the report sponsors. “I think it’s appropriate to hold [Johnson] accountable for the promises he’s made,” Bhatti told Crain’s. “Mayor Johnson ran on a platform that actually included some of these things.”
Johnson has indeed supported some of those tax increases, but he quickly distanced himself from the proposal on Wednesday, saying the tax increases he proposed during his campaign are far smaller — just $800 million — his spokesman told Crain’s. Johnson said he had no role in the proposal.
Smells like a political ploy. “Look at me, what a fiscal moderate I am,” appears to be the setup for Johnson to claim. The Great Conciliator.
The proposal includes supposed savings of over $5 billion from things like reducing the “bloated police budget.” Particularly ridiculous is a claim that over $2 billion could be saved by issuing interest-free loans that somehow could be sold to the Federal Reserved Bank “for 0% interest.” The supposed savings would be re-spent on things like public housing, education and climate. The full proposal is here.
But wait, there’s more in other news. Angela Davis will join Johnson in a Sunday event about the future of Chicago along with “the baddest organizers in movement leaders,” according to one promoter on Twitter.
Davis was among the most notorious figures in America’s last radical era forty or fifty years ago. She was twice the U.S. Communist Party’s candidate for vice president and was warmly welcomed by the former Soviet Union (which awarded her its Lenin Peace Prize), the former East Germany and Cuba. A gun belonging to her was used in a famous attempt to spring prisoners in which four people were killed. She was prosecuted but acquitted for three capital felonies including conspiracy to murder.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
But why do you Chicagoans still live there? Hard to be sympathetic when this has gone on for so long. Take a small loss now to avoid a bigger one, later.
Speaking of the radical era 40 or 50 years ago, Brandon Johnson looks and talks like Linc in “The Mod Squad”. (The complete series can be purchased for $30). That can’t be good. Cities weren’t in massive debt like they are today. The typical police pension (at least on TV shows) was less than $1000 a month.
Pritzker is afraid of the marxists – he will give them whatever they want in the hopes they leave him alone.
Hope people like PPF realize that marxists embrace confiscatory actions, particularly for those who take more than their ‘fair share’.
Feeding the crocodiles before they eat him, which would be a jolly huge meal for the crocs!
ACRE to CTBA: Hold my beer.
It’s funny to see Ralph Martire being usurped by younger, fiscally wackier groups.
There’s something deadly serious in that. How did today’s radical left gain such power– far beyond their numbers? Because each stage did not object to escalation by the next stage, I think. Each click up enabled the next click up. Each has enabled the next. Have you seen even one Dem in Springfield, for example, say that the left in Chicago or Washington has gone too far? Almost no moderates on the left have objected to the radicals on the left.
Maybe because Martire and his associates are embedded in higher education. Ralph is a professor of public policy at Roosevelt. Amanda Kass is something similar at DePaul. They’re churning out simple-minded “urban planning” graduates who only see one side of the equation: taxes. It doesn’t help that local media provides them an unfettered platform, often without counter analysis.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing—Edmund Burke
Though I must say, that I seriously doubt that too many Dems in Illinois could be considered good men.
The colleges stopped teaching journalism and replaced it with propagandists. The advent of the internet threw gas on the fire. Every profession is being taught from a woke perspective, starting with law. Even the sciences now, engineers intentionally design racist bridges now did you hear? Too many consumers of news just go along, and those that think and question are ignored, cancelled or banned from the few media outlets that allow reader posts.
I’m curious how much longer they can sustain this commitment. Kids are notorious for being contrarians and rebelling. How much longer can rainbow shoes stay in style? Kids think tattoos from generation Z look awful. I bought a few albums because they had a parental guidance sticker on them back in the day.
Based on what my son tells me, and how they joke among his friends, it’s not going to last much longer, the kids are sick of it. When your 50 year old social studies teacher introduces theyself with pronouns, it’s pretty uncool. No matter how much the elites try to normalize the Rainbow Reich, hetero-normativity is not merely a social construct, but rather, something hardwired into the human species. They’ll never be able to get around basic biology, and they’ll have to perpetually indoctrinate every future generation into the LGB cult, and every successive generation will reject it, but will… Read more »
Good one about tattoos, I’ve been saying for years that, no tattoos is the new tattoo. Cheers;)
Leftism is a faith.
Tony Montana was more human and relatable than these people.
Suicide. And the woke MSM in Chicago will go right along with this. Notice how they don’t allow reader comments, bevause you can’t do propaganda if readers are commenting right. The MSM that prohibits comments these days is bull$ht and spewing the narrative, because it’s a one way street there. Johnson only needs to be confronted by the Chicago media about this and he will have to cave. But that won’t happen, the local news will stick to their useless human interest stories or a propaganda wall unchallenged by readers who don’t think and simply not allowed to talk.
Don’t think for a second that comment sections are immune from propaganda, group think, covert influence, or coercion. I can state with confidence that some popular sites with comment sections are more dangerous than the MSM, because they have substantial traffic and people actually read them. The social sciences have proven in experiment after experiment that people are often more susceptible to suggestion and influence from their peers than unfamiliar parties. Here’s a typical comment you could run into on a “free speech” site that’s extremely dangerous: “He’ll get away with it because he’s on the right side of the… Read more »
Dave, what you’re missing here in the WP comments section is reach. The comment section on WP doesn’t have reach. Assuming even a 1 up or down vote for every 500 readers, that’s a most several thousand people reading any particular comment. That’s nothing compared to Youtube, Twitter or Tik-Tok. Even niche anon Twitter users like 16th & 17th District Chicago Police Scanner @CPD1617Scanner have 44,400 followers reading every tweet or retweet. Here on WP, if I get 20 votes, that’s maybe 10,000 people assuming a very very generous and likely unrealistic 1:500 ratio. This is diddly squat. WP itself… Read more »
You’re right! I should do an interpretive art dance against PICA and post it on Tik-Tok. Maybe the Illinois Supreme Court will reverse and remand after they see my MC Hammer dance moves. Great idea!
True. You can find absolutely delusion bat(blank) crazy readers comments following media articles and one comment after another is completely insane.
Please be suspicious of any “ organizations “ that have the buzzwords “ people’s” and “ workers “ in their moniker. Add those as Angela Davis into the mix and it’s time to start running before you have to celebrate Lenin and Stalin birthdays .
Do it. It will hasten the race to bottom from which the adults can enter the room and rebuild our city…. These takers are a cancer and a blight on the values formerly integral to the American experiment.
She was the darling of the old communist East Germany. She praised the Berlin Wall and here is she is shaking hands with East German dictator Honecker, who was responsible for the construction of the Wall… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis “East Germany Davis and Erich Honecker in the GDR, 1972 “The East German government organized an extensive campaign on behalf of Davis.[54] In September 1972, Davis visited East Germany, where she met the state’s leader Erich Honecker, received an honorary degree from the University of Leipzig and the Star of People’s Friendship from Walter Ulbricht. On September 11 in East Berlin she delivered… Read more »
Maybe she never researched the East German STAZI before arriving?
Here’s what you do, first make a commitment to never give Brandon Johnson 12 billion dollars. Then make a commitment to move out of Chicago, then out of Illinois. In the meantime, make a real serious commitment not to listen to Angela Davis. When someone says, “first you get the money, then you get the power”, you must understand they are pure evil, won’t verify how the money was spent and will be back in a year asking for another 12 billion.
This is such a joke! Johnson is not going to get anywhere with this garbage. I have to give Johnson credit for getting absolutely everything wrong on his first day! That’s hard to do! I’ve done several high stakes and large business deals. Ted and Mark, Team Wirepoints, are VC guys and can add to this. I’m sure they’ll agree with me on several points. In order to be successful at business, you need to build a rapport and credibility. Most successful business practitioners place a substantial premium on trust. I can’t emphasize this enough. Johnson’s Position: FAIL Here’s how… Read more »
But Johnson is following the Barack Obama, Joe Biden method. Smooth talking, preach conciliation all the while pursuing a divisive agenda of my (so called progressive) way or the highway. Dave, me thinking that your definition and the extreme Leftist definitions of success are sadly just plain different!
LOL Brandon doesn’t see himself as a negotiator with the various stakeholders. He sees himself as the ruler over you. He got the votes and everyone must do what he says. That’s what being mayor means, right? Like Nancy Pelosi said, [Ballots] are the keys to the kingdom, and Brandon has the most ballots, so he is King. Progressives can’t negotiate because it goes against their values. They are not here to negotiate, they are here to revolutionize.
They’re not revolutionizing anything. They’re morons! You can’t get anywhere if you don’t understand how the game is played or even listen. I’ve tried to work with people like this. All they do is write in their notebooks, underline stuff in books, and stick post-it notes on the wall. Nothing ever materializes, and their work products are incoherent.
Spitzer put together a strong offensive game against the business class, and look where that got him.
I agree they are 100% morons. But they are morons with all the levers of power. These people are going to destroy the city just as a Mega Millions lottery winner goes bankrupt after profligately spending through all of his or her winnings. There is no one to stop them from burning it all to the ground in pursuit of their ideological beliefs. Chicago is no longer about my great-grandfather’s city, he was born in Chicago in 1910 and died in Chicago in 1997. I remember him saying he would never leave Chicago even as the neighborhood around him changed… Read more »
Tsar Nicholas tried to negotiate with the Bolsheviks. He thought they were just another reform minded interest group, just like all of the other reformer and challenges to imperial power over the centuries. He gave the Bolsheviks everything they wanted, and in the end, they still took his life and burned the country to the ground. Several million people died of starvation after the Bolsheviks took over because of pure incompetence of the people in charge. BJ in power is truly an existential threat to the continuing vibrancy of Chicago. He’s not just some blip on the radar like every… Read more »
We’re dealing with people dumb enough to omit the North / South Halsted St. designation on their advertising materials, like in the flyer Wirepoints posted above. I’m pretty sure it’s S. Halsted, but whatever. FAIL
I wonder if they did that on purpose, as a dis on the north side, because they all feel the future is the south and west sides. But the period after 750 means it was probably a typo. Stupid either way, these people are really dumb.
Posts like this are the reason I’ll never take you seriously and continue with the criticisms. They did it on purpose as some sort of sophisticated dis against the bourgeoisie? I hope you’re the only one upvoting your own posts. Hhahahahahahhahahaha
I’m not being serious, Dave. That’s why people upvoted it.
I’ll be happy to add that I upvote most all of debtor’s posts… 😉
I do too, and I like when he references history, interesting to me because I didn’t pay attention to history in school.
Thank you for the appreciation. I feel like I’m an old man screaming into the void but I’ll occasionally see some of my comments upvoted, and once or twice, I’ve heard someone more prominent in the conserve-o-sphere mention a topic I ranted and raved about in the comments section here, and it puts a smile on my face.
A bunch of downvotes can be a positive sometimes. It shows a socialist tipped off all his socialist friends.
Debtsor, I like your prose and you do your homework.
I’ve become the amateur scholar of communism in the past few years. For a long time I believed that some form of corporate neo-feudalism was our likely future. I studied a lot of serfdom and the middle ages. But the haze in the crystal ball is starting to clear and it’s showing that our future is actually communism, with the large corporations doing the bidding of government to stay in good favor. The smarter communists are starting to do this, with all that WEF, ESG, corporate diversity scores, etc, forcing corporations to do government bidding. Brandon however is really stupid,… Read more »
Yup, EXACTLY, debtor. I too have been fascinated by communism from an early age. In the late 70’s I visited friends who “lived behind the Iron Curtain”, in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The Czechs, especially were a tragic case. During the interwar period it was a fine place, democratic, prosperous, and the 10th biggest economy in the world – on a level of a Sweden. The commies wormed their way in after WW II ended, using “soft power” to take over key government ministries, trade unions, media, and the military. People very foolishly listened to their words about “democracy” and… Read more »
Exactly, it just happens because a small committed group of people want it to happen, and then everyone suffers.
+1000
But wait, there’s more! Just a matter of time before Mayor Root Causes Johnson pushes for reparations.
As you vote, so shall you reap.
Your post is slightly off. Under Brandon it will be, “As you vote so shall you weep.”
That, too !
Que the trumpets for ‘The Kenyan’ to make his appearance.
He’ll make an appearance as needed. Like Santa, he pops up when needed and then slips into the night.
Under the circumstances, this is the proper way to display Chicago’s flag. Alas.
Stop digging, Bankruptcy NOW!
Angela Fuqing Davis?? I guess murdering terrorist don’t go away, they just get older.
BLM Brandon is so predictable. Every move he makes drives more people and companies out of Chicago.
Johnson is practicing a long, successful marketing tactic known as mark up to mark down. Let his allies make outrageous financial demands on the citizenry of Chicago, then he says, “No, no, we only need $800M,” as if that’s far more reasonable. I’ll admit that he and his henchmen are bold right out of the gate. Chicago may soon regret the choice they made on April 4, 2023.
Is it boldness, or do they just fully realize no one will stop them? Kinda like the looters on the Mag Mile.
No, this is clown world! I’m dedicating an entire thread to this joke of a document. Mark up to mark down?? You and Johnson don’t know a thing about contracts, behavioral economics, consumer psychology, etc. This isn’t a flea market.
Actually, it is you that doesn’t know a damn thing about negotiations, politics, the government sector.
I’d love to hear your communism is good for business pitch. Please don’t hold back.
Dave Hardy – I have no quibble with your explication of negotiation. Those principles work when both parties care about a desirable outcome. Here, Johnson and his cohort don’t care about desirable outcomes for the City, just their friends. Don’t take this as being unduly critical – your points indeed describe why Johnson will be a catastrophe (to what degree, we shall see). But there is little hope he will be responsible. I note that Jennie Huang Bennett – in her last gasp as CFO – competent she is – is beseeching politicians to delay the Tier II firefighters vote… Read more »
I get it. I’m also familiar with the strategies Johnson and some of these goons could be evaluating / implementing. It appears they are venturing into guerilla tactics, or what the U.S. military refers to as unconventional / irregular warfare. There’s substantial doctrine that has been developed by militaries and private interests to execute and counter similar strategies. I plan on commenting on them from time to time, so look out for it. Here’s an infographic from the Special Operations Research Office that neatly sums things up.
Here’s another similar chart.
There’s no need to be overwhelmed. Movements like this seize and exploit vulnerability. A common tactic for these movements is to overemphasize vulnerabilities and diminish morale. Bad news is highlighted and strength building wins are disregarded. You’ll see it in just about all the major comment sections of news and political sites. Phrases like: “We can’t win,” “They’re too powerful,” “The majority voted for this,” “You’re better off moving,” “They’ve been in power for 70 years,”etc. are a dead give away.
Here’s a simple chart that sums things up.
His people are ideologically committed to the $12,000,000,000 a year in new taxes. They’ve already spent the money in their head transforming Chicago into a progressive utopia. These taxes are punitive and intended to punish the business community that supported his opponent. It’s a straight up Hugo Chavez playbook. BJ said he was going to do this, it was his entire platform. BJ is not a smart person. That dumb grim he always has on his face is because there is nothing going on in his head, it’s the ice cream truck music playing in his head every time he… Read more »
My brother – a well known economist – was asked in a public q and a forum why Venezuela is in such trouble and people are leaving. He responded that they are starving, and then said, next question? Welcome to socialism and state control.
The very same Angela Davis, symbol of the black power movement, whose ancestors traveled on the Mayflower to the new world and who were also slave owners. I’m still awaiting her opinion on reparations. That should be interesting.
Komrad Johnson sitting down with Komrad Davis. That, too, should be interesting.