Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Chicago Tribune
Editorial

That faint wheeze emanating Tuesday from the Cook County Building was another of County Board President John Stroger's suggested tax increases dying for lack of votes.

The proposal that passed away Tuesday would have raised the sales tax in Cook County. That notion is now as dead as a Stroger plan for a lease tax on everything citizens and businesses rent.

Stroger did get a half-a-loaf victory in his effort to raise tax revenue rather than slash his proposed 2004 budget of almost $3 billion. The County Board, meeting as a Finance Committee of the whole, tentatively approved an increase from 18 cents to $1 on every pack of cigarettes sold.

The vote was 9-8, with four of the yes votes coming from County Board members who had promised in the 2002 election cycle that they would demand that future budgets be balanced by cutting spending rather than raising taxes. The four were Earlean Collins, Deborah Sims, Joan Patricia Murphy and John Daley.

Give Collins credit, at least, for standing up to Stroger's proposed sales and lease taxes. They died because she would not support them.

Eight other board members made the same promise not to raise taxes without first cutting costs--and they kept it. They are Peter Silvestri, Michael Quigley, Forrest Claypool, Larry Suffredin, Gregg Goslin, Carl Hansen, Tony Peraica and Elizabeth Ann Doody Gorman. May their honesty be rewarded in the future.

Murphy, Collins and Sims all fell for empty rhetoric from board member Roberto Maldonado, lead sponsor of the cigarette tax hike, about how the new revenue would help treat childhood asthma and other diseases caused by smoking.

Baloney. Stroger had publicly admitted that money from the tax increase would be used to help balance his budget, which as proposed has a $58 million shortfall. Maldonado's noble-sounding fiction was exposed when Suffredin confronted him with an amendment to spend all revenue from the cigarette tax not to balance Stroger's budget, but to treat lung illnesses and campaign against smoking. All that piety about helping children? That suddenly went right out the window. Suffredin's amendment failed. Murphy, Collins, Sims and any other board member who naively believed a cigarette tax increase is about improving health care wound up looking exactly like what they were: patsies.

The cigarette tax hike isn't a sure thing. It has been approved in committee but not by the same 17 people meeting as the County Board. That vote comes later this month. Collins telegraphed a willingness to switch sides and kill the tax increase if Stroger doesn't order the county's elected officials--the sheriff, state's attorney and so forth--to cut their budgets.

Something has to be cut. The county's projection that the cigarette tax increase would raise an additional $32 million this year barely plugs half of the hole in Stroger's budget.

As several board members noted, any tax increase is indefensible. In 2002, citizens fed up with Cook County's bloated government voted five board members out of office. As Tuesday's vote on a cigarette tax hike demonstrates, voters haven't finished the cleanup they started two years ago.