For Immediate Release: September 16th, 2025
Media Contacts: Julie Dworkin, julie@i4pg.org, (785) 331-9039
Today the City of Chicago’s Financial Future Task Force Work Group released their recommendations for addressing the city’s budget gap. As a member of this working group, the Institute for Public Good focused on building a budget that would protect Chicago families, preserve the city’s social safety net, and challenge the ‘business as usual’ fiscal strategy that keeps Chicago reliant on regressive fines and fees instead of investing in the future of our city by asking the wealthiest and most profitable in our city to pay their fair share.
Unfortunately, the report continues Chicago’s decades-long reliance on regressive strategies: raising fees and fines on everyday people, cutting worker pay and benefits, and sidestepping the responsibility of the large corporations and institutions in our city. Of the 23 new revenue ideas that Chicago has the power to implement, only 5—just 11% of the revenue—target those with the greatest ability to pay. The rest lean heavily on higher property taxes, garbage fees, grocery taxes, and inflated costs that affect those with less, the most.
IPG was also disappointed to see, in a time when cuts to federal funding are creating an existential crisis for state and local governments across the country, that many of the working group’s proposed “efficiencies” come directly from the workforce through furloughs, and reduced health care for city workers. The group also overlooked real efficiencies like eliminating more than 1,000 long-standing vacancies in the police department—a step that could free $150–200 million. Even with the help of Ernst & Young’s analysis, the group identified less than 40% of the budget gap in savings, underscoring the fact that Chicago cannot cut its way out of this crisis.
Though there are glimpses of progressive revenue in the report, including a return of the head tax, voluntary payments from larger non-profit institutions that don’t pay property taxes, and licensing fees for corporations, it is clear that Chicago’s options for raising revenue are constrained by state law – with most city-controlled tools being regressive, making life less affordable for working people.
That is why we must both push the state to allow the city to enact progressive policies, and maximize the progressive options we do have. Chief among them is reinstating the corporate head tax, which Rahm Emanuel phased out in 2012. Properly updated for inflation and modern corporate tax breaks, a head tax could generate over $400 million annually while exempting small and medium businesses, nonprofits, and grocery stores. Making this shift to emphasize taxing those who can most afford to pay, could eliminate most of the proposed fees, fines, and taxes on every day Chicagoans.
Even the recommendations that did require Springfield action, where the power to tax progressively can be granted, were largely focused on regressive consumer fees and did not include progressive options like a payroll expense tax similar to what was adopted in Seattle that could generate over $1 billion in Chicago.
Chicago is at a critical juncture: We are facing a large budget deficit, cuts from the federal level, growing needs of residents as critical services are abandoned, all while corporate profits soar. The budget work group report shows that cuts alone will not be possible, and that Chicago’s hands are largely tied by the state when it comes to progressive revenue.
We cannot cut our way out of this budget crisis. We cannot balance the budget on the backs of working people. We must choose the third way – maximize progressive revenue options, like the head tax, and optimize the budget in places that don’t harm workers or impact the services upon which everyday Chicagoans rely.
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Institute for the Public Good is a non-partisan policy institute that strengthens the public good by releasing research and supporting legislative efforts that advance racial equity and economic justice. We define a public good as a resource, service, or benefit that is accessible to everyone in society, and is supported through public funding and operation. Expansion of the public good is necessary in creating a society that supports the basic needs of everyone within it, while creating and sustaining robust services that work effectively for all of us.