Piss Poor Planning Again

This is typical of politicians everywhere, so Conehead isn't be one-hundred-percent at fault. We've written about this before:

• a politician dreams up a new tax/fee/payment for whatever;
• they claim without any proof whatsoever, that this tax/fee/payment with generate $100 bazillion dollars;
• the City Council (or Springfield or DC) passes the new tax/fee/payment;

....and this is the important part....

• they then pass a new spending budget with these imaginary tax/fee/payment dollars baked into the budget numbers without having seen even a single new dollar in the tax coffers.

Normal people, being normal, adjust their spending habits on what benefits themselves the most. If that means forgoing a new purchase or skipping a trip downtown or even cancelling something that they don't really need, but had been buying it out of habit, then they'll do that.

And suddenly, government isn't getting money that they had planned on getting....and already spent. So they end up....RAISING TAXES TO COVER THE "SHORTFALL" that isn't really a shortfall but rather another example of poor planning.

Like this:

• When the City Council unanimously rejected Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed $300 million property tax increase, it blew a giant hole in the city’s $17.3 billion budget. Now, the hole is getting bigger.

  A tax on prepaid phones and calling cards the Johnson administration was counting on to raise $40 million has been shot down in Springfield. Illinois Retail Merchants Association President Rob Karr said there were technical problems that must be fixed in the legal language the city drafted.

  The city also had assumed the increased tax (9%, up from 3%) would take effect Jan. 1 — a virtually impossible deadline for retailers.

If we started running our household budget like this, we'd be bankrupted by late fees and foreclosures and massive interest payment hits.

But Conehead (and the pols) just raise our property taxes by hundreds of millions.