Oct. 15--Bowling for dollars? Really? It's come to this in Cook County?
As if it weren't bad enough that their sport recently was eliminated from consideration to be an Olympic sport in Tokyo in 2020, bowlers would be taxed under Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle's proposed 2016 budget.
The county looks to tax bowling, tennis, golf and other public participatory sports. Cable TV, too. It's just another effort by another local government struggling to dig itself out of another financial mess.
This is written with a sigh of exasperation similar to that with which these moves have been proposed, as it's hard to argue, even with budget cuts, they're completely unnecessary. But still.
This is some state we're in.
Cook County and Chicago have started to address the ugly math -- cuts to this and that, tax hikes and new fees -- to pay down debt, pension obligations and whatever else has piled up like so much of what's revealed each spring when the winter snow by your sidewalk finally melts.
If Illinois' governor and legislature down in Springfield ever decide to get to work, who knows what they'll wind up having to cut and tax and by how much?
"Chief executives ... at the county and the city and the state level in the past have not addressed our structural problems," Preckwinkle said during a meeting Wednesday with the Tribune editorial board. "The result of that is that we haven't met our obligations and now, basically, the chickens have come home to roost at every level."
Chickens home to roost and we've no nest egg to speak of.
The bowling thing is a very small part of what Preckwinkle seeks to do next year, but it's also the smallness of it that makes it so nettlesome.
All told, subjecting these things to the county's existing 3 percent amusement tax will only net about $20.25 million, and $18 million of that is expected to come from taxing cable.
We'll save for another day our concern that cord-cutters abandoning cable threaten to make that a shrinking revenue source for the county going forward.
When your county also is proposing elimination of a drug diversion program -- albeit one seemingly mismanaged and underutilized -- it's no time for games.
Preckwinkle will tell you the bowling/cable thing is not a tax increase, that she's just closing a loophole, removing exemptions. Exemption, tax expansion -- the bottom line is county residents will pay more, and little by little the quality of life erodes.
"We're taxing basically the same things that the city is taxing," Preckwinkle said, as if getting hit twice is supposed to make anyone feel better.
(Hint: It doesn't.)
"This is a very attractive area of the country in which to do business," Preckwinkle said when asked if the cumulative economic effect of the cumulative taxes might be cumulatively problematic.
"We're the hub, the transportation hub of the Midwest, the capital of the Midwest," she said. "We have lots of advantages in terms of not just our transportation logistics, but the quality of our workforce, so I think we'll continue to be strong economically."
At some point, however, if it's not death by a thousand pin pricks for that quality workforce, then it's the impetus to move where there are fewer pins and they're not stuck so deep.
Preckwinkle tried to talk up Cook County's regional cooperation with Chicago's collar counties on initiatives to boost the area's overall economy.
The potential, like all potential around here, has to be weighed down by the legacy problems born of political expediency that we wind up paying for one way or another.
Tax or not, that's just how we roll.
Margin call: Grace Bedell, age 11, wrote presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln 155 years ago Thursday, suggesting he'd "look a great deal better" with a beard. Lincoln responded: "Do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?" A month later, he grew the beard.
philrosenthal@tribpub.com
