Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the City We Deserve

by Tom Tresser (editor)

The Mayor (and just about everyone else) claims that Chicago is broke. This civic education project will refute that claim. We are going to show that - far from being broke, Chicago has ample resources to become the city we all need and deserve. We have gathered a great team of local experts to write short articles describing how we can save and generate MAJOR revenues for Chicago. The book is divided into three sections: (1) Money That Is Stolen From Us - Money We Should NOT Have Spent, (2) Money That Is Hidden From Us and (3) Money That We Are NOT Collecting - But Should Be. Our goal is to make Chicago taxpayers super smart about how the city really works and influence conversations about next year's budget and beyond.

102 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Ishan Daya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow surprisingly good?? It’s not a beautifully written piece, but it is so clear, concise/to the point, and makes things that have been purposefully built with complexity into pieces of ingestible information to better understand things like: TIFs, Public Banking, regressive v progressive taxation, high frequency trading taxation, and how we can actually create an equitable structure of tax and non-tax revenue to better fund the city.

We have everything we need, and we even have a blueprint of some initial tests and steps we can take. The book does a great job of laying it out and creating foundational knowledge to continue community exploration and ideation on what we need, and ways to fund it.

Surprise, surprise: defund the police, tax financial trading (aka high profile gambling), create progressive income taxation, eliminate TIFs, create a public bank, empower youth through a youth council, create freedom schools and civic labs, etc etc

[Nell Salzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Our budgets and how we manage them reflect our values, morals and policy priorities."

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Heartland Cafe has been hosting weekly events of a politically progressive nature since early on in the Bernie Sanders primary campaign. Since the Electoral College's selection of Donald Trump as president this meetings have continued with a greater urgency, becoming most recently fora for local activists along the broad front of the left. One of them, professor Tresser, spoke recently about local budget issues, offering a book he'd recently edited as a diagnosis of some of Chicago's problems. I was impressed by his presentation, interested in two of the proposed remedies for the budgetary shortfall and so, with a friend, purchased two copies of this collection of essays.

Sadly, the book, while definitely important and timely, is not very well done. Beyond a couple of unexcuseable typos, the essays are, with only one exception, rather bare bones, dry and not very engaging. They read like annotated outlines of what might become interesting articles.

[Stephen Rynkiewicz]

Add up the cost of police abuse settlements, toxic debt swaps, privatized assets, TIF gimmicks and other local government frauds, and pretty soon you're talking real money. With an array of property, income and sales taxes on the rise, you'd think Chicago finally would be ready for reform.

Tom Tresser (not the Suicide Squad hero but the local TIF nemesis) and his fellow essayists call out the worst financial offenders and the most promising, if not most likely, solutions. Incumbent politicians will spend lavishly to distract voters from lax oversight and financial gamesmanship, so Tresser's spadework is timely. If we're serious about draining the swamp, we need to start digging trenches.

[Marius · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great liberal screed with some interesting points and great information on the very opaque TIF mechanism used here on Chicago. As information it was great but as with many screeds of whatever ideological stripe (and I am a liberal) is that the solutions presented are often represented as pain free. I wish it laid out a more nuanced case as for why the pain these measures would cause would be WORTH it given our city's problems.

[RJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book with interesting ideas. Definitely has an agenda, so it glosses over some issues with or counterpoints to their arguments. I read the Kindle version and there are SO MANY typos that it was a distraction.

[Brittney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did enjoy that this information was written plainly and in an understandable way. Great that it was a quick read, but also not great. Like most reviews say, I feel like each point could of gone into more detail. A part two would be great!

[John Mihelic · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Tresser et al look at the different ways that Chicago is spending money and leaving money on the table, giving lie to the idea that there is no money for the schools and transit and other things that make the city work for all the people of the city. The authors make a persuasive case that the reforms listed in the book would make the city more solvent. This matters not just for the residents of the city, but also for people like myself in the metro region. Chicago is so big it has a gravity all its own. Chicago problems become problems here in Brookfield too.

What was most interesting was the look at the TIF districts. These were originally created to help development where there would be no development, but instead have morphed into a way to enrich developers at the expense of residents throughout the city. This TIF money is like a slush fund and oddly there’s not a great accounting of where it all is. This is not just a Chicago problem, but they do it well there. Ultimately, it is civic activists like Tresser who make the needed changes happen. Maybe not all the hoped-for changes will happen, but this is a good starting point for a larger conversation about civic budgeting.