Chicago: 'First we get the money,' then we take their suitcases?
Red Meat For Mushy Moderates
My family and I lived in Chicago for a year while my father was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. We lived in university housing on the South Side after moving from lily-white North Dallas to a neighborhood where the local elementary school was 70% Black.
To say it was a culture shock is a understatement. In our neighborhood in Madison Park, since gentrified, it was not unusual to hear gunfire at night. While my father was a teaching assistant and had a fellowship to pay for some of our expenses, it was the only time in my life that I actually felt poor. There was little money for anything other than essentials. Our favorite activity was going to the enormous Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, where admission was mercifully free.
Still, it was a good experience for all of us, except my mother, who often complained that we were living in “a slum.” It exposed us to the kind of diversity we never would have experienced at that private all-boys Dallas day school, where dad taught the sons of such luminaries such as Tom Landry and the oil-rich Hunt family.
As we pulled our moving van up to our apartment building to unload it in the sooty, oppressive late-summer Chicago heat, we were confronted with the herculean task of lugging everything up three flights of stairs (there were no elevators, as I recall). At the same time, the 1968 Democratic National Convention was just getting underway about three miles away. If you’re not familiar with that disaster, it tore Chicago and the Democratic Party apart. There is a very good history of that convention written by the late great Haynes Johnson in Smithsonian Magazine.
Suffice it to say that the city was inundated with at least 10,000 anti-Vietnam War protesters who were met by 23,000 or so police and National Guardsmen. The week was a bloody mess and it doomed the Democratic Party’s chances of holding onto the presidency. After all, if Hubert Humphrey and the Democrats couldn’t even run a convention, how could they be trusted with running the government and ending the Vietnam War?
Along with my new friend, also a graduate student’s son, I climbed up a tree and watched a demonstration, though fortunately, it wasn’t violent, as so many of the other confrontations were during that bloody week.
That’s a lot of words to describe my personal connection with Chicago. That bond continues to move me to care at least a little bit about what happens in the city — the recent race for mayor being one example.
It’s one of America’s great cities, but like many of its peers, Chicago has been beset with problems ever since I can remember. Now things might get worse with the election of Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and former teacher’s union activist.
According to Crain’s Chicago Business (and multiple other media outlets), allies of the new mayor “are rolling out a $12 billion financial proposal that doubles down on controversial tax-hike ideas pitched by Johnson during his campaign and adds a few more.” The report, ominously entitled, “First We Get The Money,” was co-written by a public-sector union activist and member of Johnson’s own transition team. It is, by all indications, being taken seriously.
These proposals include the “enactment of a city wealth tax and income tax, deep cuts in police spending, and an effective end to all tax-increment financing projects.”
“Authors of the proposal, which also includes a tax on vacant high-end rental apartments, say they’re not fronting for Johnson and suggest they rather are trying to hold his feet to the fire and push him to stand by his campaign promises in a way they believe former Mayor Lori Lightfoot did not,” says Crain’s.
It remains to be seen whether Johnson has the testicular fortitude to resist the temptation of his union allies to participate in this unwise money grab, from which the mayor is now wisely distancing himself.
It goes without saying that the scheme could backfire and result in less revenue to pay for all the programs and additional union jobs Johnson and his allies want to create. As I have observed previously, the data on whether rich people move out of state to avoid new tax burdens are inconclusive.
As a 2018 report published in the CT Mirror, headlined “The millionaire-with-a-suitcase: man or myth?,” made clear, “the empirical evidence shows the rich tend to move less frequently than low- and middle-income residents. The need for employment is still one of the main reasons people move while home and business ownership — most common among high-income households — promote stability.”
Still, it’s much less disruptive to simply move out of the big city to tony, lower-tax nearby suburbs like Winnetka or Lake Forest, than to pick up and move to Indiana or Florida. Warning to Mayor Johnson: Millionaires still have suitcases— and they lik the police.
I grew up on the far south side of Chicago in Morgan Park. It was a diverse block of people, Jewish, Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro, a few Blacks, and me - Swedish looking. We all got along with each other. The 1968 Democratic Convention was really frightening. Our parents put us on "lockdown" so I could not go on the commute train to my first summer job - typing in the Geography Department at Encyclopedia Britannica. The 1970's were also really bad with all of the protests over the assassinations of ML King, RFK, Sr. Malcolm X, etc. An aunt and uncle rescued me. I ended up at a small private college in the East Bay of San Francisco, staying out there for 30 years. I'm in Evanston, IL now. I'm already really worried about what could happen at the 2024 Democratic Convention. My only hope is Governor J.B Pritzger takes away "home rule" from Chicago permanently and has the National Guard on stand-by. It would be a very bad situation on TV screens around the world. There's never been a competent mayor in Chicago. It was a really bad decision to hold the convention here.
"First We Get the Money" is considered DOA here in Chicago, more a fantasy justice exercise from Brandon Johnson's progressive amen corner than a blueprint for practical revenue-raising. Johnson floated most of its ideas during the campaign, but backpedaled fast and hard when so much of the city was aghast. In short, the massive, punitive tax plan isn't going to get even a polite, pro forma hearing from the City Council and business interests, and probably not even from Johnson himself. A big, common mistake the far left makes with shakedown tax schemes like this is failure to perform dynamic analysis; they assume the targets will just stand there like cows in the rain and take it. It's lost on them that, in Terry's phrase, these people have suitcases.