How Do You Run a City Without a Tax Base?

I think Chicago is trying to find out. Mayor Johnson Drives Chicago’s Business Sector to Record Lows

Being the good Progressive that he is, Brandon Johnson hates business and commerce. And the business and commerce in Chicago have noticed.

Office space vacancies have soared to 28.2 percent in Chicago, which is higher than the vacancy rate from before the pandemic. The latest contraction marks the 14th straight quarter of rising vacancies, according to The Center Square.

Of course the exodus of business and money didn't start with Johnson, and if he quit tomorrow it would continue. Because it is the Chicago Machine that hates business. Jane Byrne was probably the last Chicago mayor to understand that Chicago needed businesses to produce jobs, if Chicago was to have any future at all. Jane Byrne left that office in 1983.

As for the businesses leaving Chicago, the marque places are going first. That will impact what little tourism is still left.

Chicago's famed Magnificent Mile was hardest hit, too, going from 1,600 registered businesses to only 784 in 2024 -- that's a 51 percent drop.

And there are reasons that the businesses are leaving. It is how the city and the state are run.

Businesses face a lot of pressures. They pay the second-highest state corporate income tax rates in the nation and the highest commercial property taxes in the country.

How very Progressive of them.

I think I mentioned before that I worked for a company in the 1980s that left the city over taxes. Things were much less insane back then.

Should be an interesting case study in how a city decides to emulate the fiscal collapse of Detroit. Something to watch from a safe distance.