April 17, 2009
Chicago Sun-Times Editorial

Did you hear about Cook County Board President Todd Stroger’s tax rollback?

For every $100 you spend, you’ll pay 25 cents less in county sales taxes.

Starting Jan. 1 next year.

Whoopee.

We’re all for tax breaks, but we like them to be meaningful.

And we like to know how we’re going to pay for them.

On both counts, the Stroger plan fails.

Last year, Stroger said he needed hundreds of millions of dollars more a year to keep the county running. And he got it. The county sales tax more than doubled, from .75 percent to 1.75 percent, making the total sales tax in Chicago 10.25 percent, the highest in the nation.

Now, with the economy in even worse shape, Stroger proposes reeling the county sales tax back to 1.5 percent, blowing a $100 million hole in the county budget every year.

Worse yet, at a news conference the other day, Stroger made it clear the county doesn’t have a rock-solid idea how it’s going to pay for this.

There’s talk of money from the Obama stimulus package, plus other possibilities, but he acknowledged he had “no hard numbers.”

We’d like to believe Stroger’s plan wasn’t simply aimed at getting re-elected next year.

Or timed to overshadow Commissioner Tony Peraica’s proposal to roll back the entire sales tax increase.

But given the lack of details, it’s hard to believe otherwise.

As for Peraica’s plan, we support scaling back the entire sales tax increase because the county has not made a convincing case why it needs that money every year.

We’ll leave it to the commissioners to decide whether to do it all at once or over four years — as Commissioner Forrest Claypool suggests.

Both commissioners have offered solid suggestions on how to cut waste and excess at the county to pay for that rollback.

Either way, residents need some real tax relief — and soon.