-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.
Continue reading “
Tax Victory: Chicago/Cook County Soda Tax Canceled Starting Today”
I believe it is now time for us to speak up about the swirling news over the last 24 hours.
In Illinois we have a complicit, left-wing media establishment that will never write a bad story about Democrats. This deal with 8th District Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth–a candidate for the US Senate, no less–is a perfect example. Duckworth is being accused of punishing two whistleblowers who were trying to uncover Duckworth’s massive mismanagement when she was at the VA and yet the media is practically silent on the story.
Last month I noted that the Illinois state legislature is still pushing yet another tax to bedevil its already over taxed citizenry with the plan to push a tax on satellite TV providers. That plan has not abated.Unfortunately, it is just another example of Illinois burdening it citizens because of the failure of the politicians.
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.
The Mayor of Bloomington, Illinois seems to have lost his mind after a local Tea Party blogger mentioned his son in one of her posts. The Mayor launched into an unnecessary, hyperbolic attack on the blogger calling her “total garbage,” and a “sick dirty slimy ignorant fool.” His spittle-specked attack was replete with a lack of proper punctuation, misspellings, and often in all caps. It was like he reverted to a 12-year-old mentality with his over the top reply.
Adam Andrzejewski has thrown his hat in the ring to become the new Illinois Governor’s pick to replace deceased State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka and I think there isn’t a better, more qualified candidate than Adam.
With the passing of Illinois State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, the state is faced with a bit of a dilemma. How should she be replaced? 
Transparency, shmansparency. Once again we see a government doing its level best to keep you, the people, from being able to find out what it is that government is doing to you. This time it is in failing Illinois where lawmakers are trying to make it much, much harder to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
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.
The Republicans bumped up their gains in the Senate and the House of Representatives and also gained in Governor’s mansions across the nation and even deep, deep blue Illinois was affected by this GOP wave. But even with these few bright spots, Illinois is the worst state in the union on every level.
In another example of why government unions should all be eliminated, two union operatives in the Illinois school system have been the happy recipients of million-dollar pensions–courtesy of the taxpayers–for teaching classes for only a single day.
Illinois is in such bad shape it can’t even produce no littering signs that are properly spelled, it appears.
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.
Last weekend Illinois GOP candidate for Governor Bruce Rauner took the ALS “ice bucket challenge.” When he did he urged Illinois Democrat leaders to join him in the challenge. In reply, the state’s Democrat House leader outrageously found a way to link the charitable challenge to a claim that Republicans are like the ISIS terrorists in Iraq!
A new poll of likely Chicago voters seems to find that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in bad shape for his re-election coming up next year. The poll shows that two other candidates are far and away more popular than the incumbent mayor. One of those two is Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, a woman who is nearly an out and proud communist. But, if Chicagoans would vote for Lewis, they don’t deserve the vote at all.
Apparently police are now cruising the web looking for people who make claims that leads one to believe they could or might or perhaps broke some jackbooted rule, regulation or law and then they are punishing them through the U.S. mails on this hearsay evidence.
Why is it not a surprise that the first moves to make Chicago the home of the Barack Hussein Obama Presidential Library are born in corruption? But I suppose it is a fitting way to start a library for one of the biggest failure and most corrupt politicians ever to sit in the White House.
Eric Kohn over at Illinois Mirror has a great piece that highlights the main difference between real capitalism and the sort of crony capitalism (which isn’t capitalism at all) that the left so dearly loves.
On WLS AM 89 radio political reporter Bill Cameron featured an interview with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that shows just why math is soooooo darn hard for politicians.