Cook County Tax Increases Pounded

The Chicago Tribune offers the best detailed analysis to-date of the impact that the tax increases being proposed will have on Cook County families.

Bottom-line:

Two-income family of four in Chicago will see a $670 increase in local taxes, or 6%.

Single retiree in Tinley Park will see an increase of $178 in local taxes, or 7%.

The analysis excludes income taxes paid, but lumps in state taxes and some federal taxes, which aren't going up.

When you focus only on taxes paid to local taxing bodies, the increases are:

Family of four: from $10,711 in local taxes to $11,381, an increase of 6.3%:

Retiree: from $1857 in local taxes to $2035, a 9.6% increase.



Stroger Utility Hikes Taking Even More Heat

While the Tribune ignored Stroger's secret plan to raise taxes on telephones, electricity and natural gas when/if his 2% sales tax increase goes down in flames, the Citizen's Utility Board isn't taking the plan lightly. At all.

CUB recently update their homepage with the theme "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly", and it features a humongous "Stop Cook County Utility Tax" Logo.

The Bad!
Help Fight Cook County's Utility Tax Hike
There's a Cook County plan to jack up utility taxes, costing the average family $360 a year. Help us fight it! Please call 1-800-791-6540 to get connected directly to your county commissioner's office.

According to CUB, new phone taxes proposed by Stroger will cost the typical family $240 per year, and new taxes on electricity and gas will add another $124 to the typical family's energy bills.



NoPhoneTax.org Coalition reflects anti-Cook County sentiments

Launched less than a month ago, NoPhoneTax.org now includes more than 80 groups from across the political and apolitical spectrum, including AARP, CUB, Metro Seniors in Action, NAACP Chicago Southside, Americans for Tax Reform, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, Illinois Retail Merchants Association, and what looks like for than two dozen churches.

Their website has had more than 62,000 hits, according to their home page ticker, and features a link for e-mailing the entire county board, as well as Board President Todd Stroger.

I've been doing campaign and grassroots organizing work long enough to realize that more than 60,000 hits in less than one month -- with no t.v. or radio ads to drive traffic, just earned media and word of mouth -- is unheard of. That is alot of anti-tax sentiment, which I would guess reflects opposition to not just the phone tax, but any tax increase by the Cook County Board.

Stroger would be wise to rethink his idea of raising any taxes, and Commissioners would have to be foolish to follow him down this path.

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Everyone stop exhaling, Please.

Yes, if we all stopped exhaling, it would reduce the level of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Fortunately, putting the brakes on the global climate crisis won't require that level of self-sacrifice. In fact, helping to save the planet has never been so painless.

Newsweek offers a special series on the environment, in the lead-up to Earth Day, and buried in there are some good, common sense nuggets that we can apply in Illinois:

Switch all stop lights from incandescent to LED. "One of the easiest measures is one of the most effective. That's converting stoplights from incandescent bulbs to LEDs...the conversion demands a major investment upfront...But since LEDs use 80 percent less energy than standard lights - and last six to ten times longer - they pay for themselves in several years...The Big Apple - which has replaced 80,000 incandescent bulbs in 12,000 intersections - will realize savings of $6.3 million a year once the initial investment of $28 million is paid off." (Did you hear that, Mayor Daley?)

Switch your household from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents. "If every household in America switched out one compact fluorescent bulb, it would reduce energy consumption as much as taking a million cars off the road." There are only 4.7 million households in Illinois, but luckily for us, compact fluorescents are sold in five-packs. If everyone in Illinois buys a pack, it will be the equivalent of taking 200,000 cars off the road. You can join global efforts and pledge to switch your bulbs through Project Switch here.

Bonus! Last time I checked, the Citizen's Utility Board was distributing compact fluorescent bulbs for free.

Unplug your chargers. I know this sounds crazy, but when your cell phone charger, I-Pod charger, laptop charger, or whatever-charger are plugged in, they continue to draw electricity and just bleed it out into the ozone, even when not charging anything. The average household draws 10 watts an hour through their chargers, which adds 87.6 Kilowatt hours per year to your electric bill. Illinoisans are spending a combined $70 million a year and burning an unnecessary 412 million Kilowatt hours of electricity just to leave their chargers plugged in all of the time.

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