The weekend of July 4, 2024, was a bloody one in Chicago. Over 100 people were shot in the city and, for 19 Chicagoans, this was the last holiday weekend they ever would see.

In its wake, this city’s business leaders announced a remarkable thing: They had come up with $104 million to fight the violent crime that they could see was threatening not just their business interests but the city in which many had chosen to raise their families and recruit others.

The list of contributors to an initiative begun earlier in the year was extensive and filled with big Illinois names: McDonald’s, JP Morgan Chase. Northern Trust, Hyatt Hotels, Illinois Tool Works, Allstate. Wealthy philanthropists, such as the Crown Family, were already part of an initiative managed by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago.

The money was to support something called Scaling Community Violence Intervention for a Safer Chicago, or SC2. The idea was to take the CVI initiatives that had proved promising and massively expand them: Initially, the plan was to focus on seven Chicago neighborhoods, including several where bodies had been found the previous weekend.

This was not the first time the business community had sounded the alarm about crime. In 2021, when pandemic-era crime was rampant, leaders such as Jack Lavin, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, had warned it could stall the city’s recovery. But that was rhetoric. By 2024, the business leaders had come up with cash, with a commitment of more to come.

We remembered that history when Mayor Brandon Johnson’s news release about his plans for the city budget reached our inboxes. We’d heard rumors of the return of the so-called head tax, a per-employee tax paid to the city that was tied to the number of employees who worked within Chicago boundaries. We were curious to see how much Johnson would propose. But the words “head tax” did not appear in a budget filled with narrative blather and ideological pronouncements.

At first we thought Johnson had enjoyed an epiphany. The head tax is a terrible idea because it gives corporations incentives to move out of the city when Chicago needs to be encouraging precisely the opposite. It tells companies such as Walgreens that they were smart to close their satellite office in the Loop and suggests others should think about doing the same. It incentivizes businesses not to add workers in Chicago, which means not adding the very people who shop, eat at restaurants and patronize our ailing transit systems.

Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel understood that the symbolic weight of the tax was also important: When he removed it, he was signaling that Chicago was serious about snagging new corporate headquarters.

Of late, that train has been moving in the other direction. Citadel has left, Boeing has left. With a big tax, it could become an express.

But where was Johnson’s head tax we were told was coming?

A-ha! Found it. It’s sneakily disguised as something called a “community safety surcharge,” aiming to raise $100 million seemingly to do something similar to what the business community already had done of its own volition and for which the city has not held up the funding level agreed last year.

Johnson’s budget applied the tax at $21 a month per employee for any corporation with more than 100 workers (precisely the corporations we need to retain and attract). That is more than five times the old rate. All aimed at precisely the people who had previously stepped up to help.

We hear they are furious. Who would not be?

“It’s not a job killer. It’s a job creator,” Johnson said Thursday of the head tax, sounding like a spokesperson for Pravda who just says stuff in the hope it will make it so. He insisted that businesses want public safety.

Sure they do. That’s why they ponied up all that money last year for something that actually is Johnson’s job, not theirs. They all remain committed to the program. Or maybe that should have remained, now the Johnson administration has co-opted the narrative and turned what was an act of civic service from the private sector into a punching bag for socialists. And disingenuously so too. He has turned generous allies — at least on the matter of fighting violent crime — into adversaries.

There was yet worse news for business in this tax-larded $16.6 billion budget. Johnson also proposes to hike the cloud-computing tax from 11% to 14%, aiming to take the diminishing group of big corporations — always with the big corporations — for another $333 million.

That’s a 27.2% increase on the heels of last year’s 22% increase in that tax. This is another job killer (or in Johnsonian parlance, another job creator). This money, too, is apparently to be earmarked for community safety, although the limits of that definition surely are in the eye of the beholder and, in realty, this is just plugging a massive hole in the budget and poking the “ultra-rich,” by which Johnson means large businesses, in the eye.

Essentially a city sales tax on what businesses pay to license cloud-based software, this levy is an inducement for companies to move workers out of the city because Chicago companies can reduce what they pay by showing that a percentage of their workers are located outside the city. Chicago is one of the only cities in America with this draconian sales tax on a necessity of modern business life. None of our suburbs impose it. As we wrote last year, this is in essence a head tax by another name. It also happens to be the equivalent of a flashing “don’t come here” sign to tech companies.

As we’ve said many times before, as this administration tries to redistribute pieces of a declining pie rather than grow the whole, these policies are going to be a boon to office buildings outside city limits. That is, if more companies don’t simply pull up stakes like Citadel and move to another state.

This budget is so bad that one editorial won’t cover all its flaws, but here’s another big problem that must be discussed. The city risks yet more credit downgrades by substantially reducing how much Chicago has been paying into its dramatically underfunded pension funds. Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski told reporters that move risked a downgrade, but she said the city had other priorities.

And — here’s the biggest no-no of them all — the city plans to float debt to cover operating expenses, something that Johnson’s finance team has ensured skeptical aldermen in past debates over future borrowing they wouldn’t do. The budget would debt-finance $90 million in settlements over past police misconduct and another $185 million owed to Chicago firefighters in back pay per a recently settled union contract — a total of $275 million.

With credit clouds hanging over this profligate administration, we can only imagine how those bonds will be greeted when they’re floated next year.

We’re not pretending that plugging this $1.2 billion deficit in a different fashion will be easy or without significant pain. But one basic principle that aldermanic critics of Johnson rightly have set isn’t close to being met in this budget. Before this administration asks for more taxes, it must show that it’s willing to cut costs far more meaningfully than this budget suggests.

Yes, that likely would mean layoffs. Other budget-stressed cities are trimming their workforces; there’s no good reason Chicago can’t, or shouldn’t.

At the end of the day, a signal this negative to investors and existing businesses simply will lead to more future budget shortfalls as the city’s economy falls into recession. Chicago needs to be open for business. Right now, Mayor Johnson is saying — in deeds, not words — that the city that works will make it as expensive as possible to bring workers. Rivals will be rubbing their hands.

It is going to be up to the City Council to stop all this madness.

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