- Brian Jackson/Sun-Times
- If Rahm’s looking for a steady flow of taxes to pay off the city’s pension obligations, look no further than the invisible tax hike that starts with a T and ends with an F.
As part of my mission to help Mayor Emanuel get out of his predicaments even if they are of his own making, I’m trying to figure out a way for him to finance his great pension scheme without pissing everyone off.
So it has to be a secret source of taxation, one that he can enact while pretending he’s not enacting it.
Hmm . . .
At the moment, I believe Cook County clerk David Orr is the only local official who even talks about the TIF tax. He explains how it works on a video that you can find on his website. (Actually, it’s not Orr narrating the video, but an anonymous narrator with a nice voice. Here, watch it yourself.)
But that’s no problem at all. First of all, hardly anyone’s paying attention. And even if someone squawks, the mayor can ask house speaker Michael Madigan to change the state law governing TIFs. I’m sure the state reps and senators will do as told—just as if they were aldermen.
