-By Warner Todd Huston
Over the last few days a western Cook County Walmart store hoisted a banner celebrating the end of the Cook County soda tax. The Walmart sign proves what a terrible idea this tax really was.
Months ago the county board for Cook, the county that boasts Chicago as its hub, levied a one cent per ounce tax on soda pop and sugared drinks. The tax was never popular. Even when it was passing the people were in the process of rising up against it and eventually the pressure got so bad that the board capitulated and announced that December 1 would mark the end of the tax.
The tax was set at a penny per ounce, so that was a hike of 20 cents per bottles of pop in a store cooler, 50 cents on a Double Gulp at 7-Eleven, and $2.88 on a case of pop at any Cook County store.
The tax was supposed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the county budget over the next few years, but it was revealed that the county expected $18 million in new tax revenue in the first month of the tax. But all officials really got was $300,000 because people either bought their pop in another county or stopped buying pop altogether. So, when ever you hear a government entity proclaim how much they will make in taxes with a new tax, know this is always a lie.
Think I am just blowing steam? We go back to the Walmart mentioned above. This Walmart in Streamwood, a far western city in Cook County, had posted this sign in the week leading up to the end of the tax:
Folks, let’s realize what this sign really means. It means that Walmart felt it was worth the expenditure of a few hundred dollars to create this banner to alert customers that they can buy soda again without the odious tax.
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Tax Victory: Chicago/Cook County Soda Tax Canceled Starting Today”
Two separate incidents concerning memorial street signs in Chicago encapsulates perfectly how warped, truly immoral, and evil the Democrat Party in the U.S.A. has become.
On January 4 a white teenager with special needs was found wandering aimlessly in a black Chicago neighborhood and when police found him he had a frightening tale of race-based torture to tell. But before he was rescued Facebook users were treated to videos of four black kids hooting and laughing as they beat the teen bloody while yelling “F white people” and “F Trump.” Unsurprisingly, because it is a white person being tortured, liberals from coast to coast are insisting this isn’t a racist hate crime.
This November the city of Chicago racked up its 700th murder with well over 600 of them killed by gunfire. And yet, Chicago’s Mayor, former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, held a big press conference to insist that his city will remain a law-breaking “sanctuary city” and that illegals will be “safe” there.
The nation awoke to the murder of five police officers by sniper fire during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, Texas, after President Obama spoke out on the earlier shootings of two black men by police in two different states. With these incidents in the news attention is once again turned to the strained relations between police and the community. But the evidence shows that police have far more to fear from African American males than the reverse.
A Chicago Tribune TV critic was aghast that Americans often enjoy the commercials during the Super Bowl. Apparently he was upset about all that capitalism going on and mad that Americans don’t rise up and throw their shoes at their TVs in revolt. Corporations are apparently all venal and wasteful, he alleges, and we shouldn’t stand for it.
The move for school choice is not only growing in Illinois in general but in Chicago in particular as politicians and parents both see the downward spiral of the public education system picking up speed.
Obama’s Chicago terrorist has been sentenced to 18 months in prison, authorities in the Windy City announced late last week. No, not his old terrorist, Bill Ayers, his newer terrorist, Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, the woman he hired to work as an Obamacare “navigator” in Illinois.
Several years ago the FBI had arrested Emad Karakrah and charged him with a series of crimes. Karakrah was involved in several plots and crimes including narco-terrorism and a 2009 plot to bomb Oprah Winfrey’s Chicago TV studios. But for some inexplicable reason, the FBI just released this dangerous man out of prison.
Barack Obama’s Chicago is the most corrupt city in all of America and the Jackie Robinson West Little League baseball team has now cemented that status by having its championship season vacated and its championship trophies stripped.
A recent survey of the wealth of members of Congress revealed that, on average, it would take the combined wealth of 18 American households to equal the wealth of a single member of Congress. While this is an averaged statistic and individual cases vary, a review of the wealth of members of the Illinois delegation to Washington proves the rule rather than the exception.
Oprah Winfrey’s Chicago-based TV studios and Chicago landmark building Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) were the subject of a previously undiscovered terror bombing plot, a new report reveals.
Inner city blacks have a skewed and untrue view of what America “is” today and it is because they live in all black neighborhoods. This often self-imposed isolation is also why white people don’t understand why blacks don’t see the progress that blacks have made in this country.
Only days after the 2014 election that gave Illinois a new business-minded, tax-cutting Republican as its new Governor, Illinois State Senator and nominal Republican Dave Syverson gave us all a perfect example of why the Illinois GOP is such a crashing failure when he chirped up that he’d love to make the “temporary” state income tax hike permanent, BEFORE the new Governor even gets a chance to take office.
After the shellacking that President Obama received at the hands of voters in the midterm elections, his chief advisor, Valerie Jarrett is finally in the hot seat. Over the weekend, two articles attacked her as all that is wrong with the White House with one piece slamming her the “Obama whisperer” and another one flat out advising Obama to fire her.
Obama’s Secretary of Education, Chicago operative Arne Duncan, is hoping to make taxpayer funded, universal pre-school a “civil right.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has over $8 million in his campaign fund and usually that sort of cash is quite a harbinger of election success but maybe not this time as the mayor’s approval ratings crater and at least two powerful opponents warm to a run against him, one of whom might be backed by the deep pockets of the national teachers union.
In 2011 a political operative attempted to sue the Illinois news website 
Obama’s Illinois perennially ranks at the very bottom of every statistic that marks a successful state and a new report on America’s “sinkhole states” finds that Illinois again ranks at the very bottom this time for how much state debt each citizen is saddled with.
The Illinois state climatologist reported on Friday that the preliminary assessment of last month’s temperatures tied the record for the coolest July in recorded history but that as the data is further quantified it will likely break the record.
It has been revealed that Muslim Imam in a Chicago mosque has been calling for Chicago Muslims to go wage jihad against the Jews by flying to Gaza to join the fighting there.
The “religion of peace” is at it again, this time posting warnings in Chicago that they intend to start attacking Jews in the Windy City.
Chicago, Illinois is losing at least 3 to 4 citizens every weekend to violence with upwards to 25 shot. EVERY weekend. Chicago pols, the city’s police superintendent, and state Democrats say we need to ban guns to “fix” the problem. But the Detroit Chief of Police says an armed citizenry is making HIS city safer. Chicago could learn a lesson, here.