In a new column at Crain’s Chicago Business, CEA President John Mozena warns Chicagoans that their city’s practice of piling fiscal burdens on everyone then exempting a few favored large taxpayers through economic development deals risks throwing the city into a spiral that is all too familiar to other once-great American cities:
This spiral happens when people no longer want to live someplace, and with the people gone there’s no longer any reason for companies to do business there. Unfortunately, that’s the direction in which Chicago is currently headed. State and city politicians seem determined to find the limit of exactly how much burden the residents of the City of Broad Shoulders are willing to bear, while simultaneously exempting favored companies and developers from bearing those same burdens through subsidies, incentives, tax increment financing districts and other “economic development” mechanisms.