Quote:
Originally Posted by Vlajos
No, city government is already too costly and we have massive pension debt to get under control. Any tax increase should be solely dedicated to reducing debt.
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I agree that the city and state should both raise taxes to get the pension debt under control and I was sorry when the graduated income tax was voted down last fall. But I don’t think either voters or aldermen would approve a tax increase for the pension debt. Unfortunately, I think it will take some kind of crisis to get Springfield and City Hall to deal with this.
On the other hand, people will vote to raise taxes for transportation. Voters in LA have approved a series of tax increases, the last of which was in Nov 2016 and approved by 71% of the voters. The LA tax increases are funding an $80 billion, 30-year transportation infrastructure plan. And last fall voter in Austin voted to raise taxes to pay the city’s share of a $7.1 billion transit plan, including a subway through downtown. The difference between transportation municipal pensions is that people see tangible benefits to a transit plan; they see benefits that will make both the city and their own lives better. With pensions, however, people don’t see payments to fund pensions as making their lives or the city any better. A lot of people fell like the teachers (for example) can go to hell.
Now LA ran a very good promotional/marketing campaign to convince people vote for the tax increases. And if Chicago did the same, I think people would probably approve it.
Secondly, I’m assuming that the feds would pay for half of a transportation plan. A plan to spend $60 billion over thirty years would require $1 billion a year from the state/city. My argument for allocating more of the state’s transportation budget to Chicago is this: Areas of the state that are growing need to spend more money on infrastructure than areas that aren’t growing. And downtown Chicago is the only large area of the state that’s growing.
We’re not going to get any money from the feds or the state to pay for city’s municipal pensions
Thirdly, if the city raised its share of $60 billion over 30 years with no borrowing and if that supported a 300,000 increase in downtown jobs, the city would be in a much improved financial position.