‘Guaranteed Minimum Income’ means guaranteed maximum tax hikes.
In 2019, Evanston, Illinois, a Cook County city, announced it would provide $20 million in racial reparations to black people. The city has made $7 million in illegal racial payments, but is being sued for racial discrimination, and its financial problems are leading to a 9% property tax hike.The whopping $5 million tax increase includes an 8.9% property tax hike, a 25% water rate increase, and a doubling the natural gas tax, which will help push local residents out of their homes, and ironically, the homeowners most likely to be pushed out as a result will be black.
The crushing hikes also include a variety of other Chicago taxes, including a shopping bag tax, a streaming tax, a rideshare tax, and then perhaps, as the Beatles suggested, a foot tax.
Mayor Daniel Biss, the city’s ultra-woke leader and perennial candidate, currently the Democrat nominee for the Illinois 9th congressional district, with an academic history of retracted papers and a relationship with an undergrad behind him, argued in favor of the illegal racial reparations that “it’s something that we’re enormously proud of. I think it’s an important step, one might argue a partial step or an inadequate step, but still a really important step, toward both, on a factual level, reckoning with our past.”
The first step to reckoning with the past would be by acknowledging actual historical facts.
Illinois was never a slave state and one of the first acts of the pre-constitutional Confederation Congress was to pass the Northwest Ordinance which in Article VI laid out that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” Evanston was spun off from Northwestern University, whose Methodist leaders were vehement opponents of slavery, and the city only became incorporated during the Civil War and never had any slaves.
Its only slaves today are its homeowners.
But the illegal racial reparations helped Biss build a platform for higher office and has now entangled the city in an extended civil rights battle even as it’s struggling to pay its bills.
Descendants of former white homeowners sued Evanston, and, represented by Judicial Watch, complained that they had been barred from applying for the racial grants. Evanston’s lawyers retorted that they hadn’t tried to apply for them while their lawyers pointed out that the grants were only open to black people and the judge agreed that it would have been “futile” to expect white people to apply for grants that the city had already said they were racially ineligible for.
Two years later, the DOJ has joined the lawsuit.”Handing out money based on race… is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple. And it is illegal,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division warned Evanston.
Apart from the cost of the litigation, Evanston will potentially be on the hook for having to hand out similar $25,000 grants to the descendants of white homeowners if it loses the case.
And sizable fines for engaging in racial discrimination.
Evanston’s woke spending sprees are now putting financial pressure on city residents.
Apart from a potential $20 million in racial reparations and the resulting federal civil rights lawsuit, there is also the socialist ‘Guaranteed Minimum Income’ of $500 a month to 100 people that Evanston committed to back in 2021, which comes out to around $600,000 a year.
A ‘Guaranteed Minimum Income’ also means guaranteed maximum tax hikes.
The current budget also lists assorted woke policies such as a climate plan with “100% renewable electricity” from solar panels and wind turbines, 25% electric cars for the government and “100 climate resilience projects”. A few million for racial welfare, a few million for climate graft, and suddenly Evanston is in the hole and needs to raise property taxes by 8.9%.
And instead of cutting any of the woke programs, taxes are being pushed even higher.
The formal proposed tax hike comes after the median property tax bill in Evanston was already up 5% this year and local homeowners are struggling with the high cost of living. --->READ MORE HERE
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