Nicky Cheese

Halfway to the “el” (Chicago’s elevated subway) I realize I forgot reading material for my morning commute. Dang.

25 minutes without anything to occupy my mind? Nothing but my imagination and/or observations of my immediate surroundings? I’d rather not.

So, in a somewhat defeated act, I picked up a RedEye. The RedEye, for those of you unfamiliar, is a free, tabloid-format daily that has the news quality of, say, Access Hollywood. Let’s see: “Read My Lips…the secret to smart smooching” as the cover story? Today’s edition doesn’t appear to be an exception.

However, somewhere between perfecting kisses and a expose of Chicago-area psychics was a little gem entitled “Tax day is every day in Chicago”, an article shedding light on the self-perpetuating flood of taxes Chicagoans pay out everyday, particularly those that by design go under the radar.

Soft-drink tax. Wheel tax. Amusement tax. Restaurant tax. Of course, that’s just to name a few. Coming soon? Perhaps a bottled-water tax. As the article states, “it’s not easy to keep track of all the times the city dings you because it has about two dozen different–and sometimes obscure and stealthy–ways to do it.”

Well, that’s an understatement.

Civic Federation, a tax watchdog group referenced in the article, has stepped up to the daunting task of tracking the Chicago tax fog with their latest research report “Selected Consumer Taxes in the City of Chicago”, published earlier today.

Check it out. I did. And you know what? I’m actually thinking of supporting Adbusters’s “Buy Nothing Day”. Not to protest consumerism, of course. That’s just silly. But rather to indirectly protest the beast that is Chicago taxes.