Tax Revenue Generation

The City needs money. It's a never-ending quest.

Democrats think you can tax everybody and everything into prosperity but all that does is drive out the people who can afford to leave and they take their money with them. It also drives us to do all of our shopping in the suburbs and collar counties, not to mention out-of-state when we need un-serialized ammunition. 

There used to be giant tax generating entities in Chicago that funded much of the government - McCormick Place conventions, the Mag Mile, a thriving bar, music and entertainment scene. 

But cost overruns killed the convention business, the Mag Mile is a plywood forest, Chicago went from a few thousand bars to a few hundred, movie theaters are dying, stage plays are few and far between, the Bears are leaving and so are the White Sox. And instead of dealing with these shortfalls, Fata$$ and Conehead raise hotel and restaurants taxes for tourists that aren't coming in numbers big enough to save the city.

But here's a bright idea that's sixty years overdue:

• Madison Street on the city’s West Side has been rocked by some serious body blows over the last 60 or so years and it shows: the unhealed scars left by the civil unrest that followed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, nearly three generations of disinvestment and scores of vacant commercial buildings.

  Yet the street goes on. Down, perhaps. But never quite out.

  And now, the thoroughfare is the focus of a city study aimed at helping bring new retail, housing and other activity to three miles of Madison Street, stretching from the shadow of the United Center to the heart of K-Town.

The United Center has (had?) the potential to be an anchor for west side redevelopment that was never fully explored or exploited. People always knew that the Mag Mile was a massive generator of revenue and jobs for decades. But not many knew that the second highest generator of revenue was the Twenty-Sixth Street business corridor for most of the 80's, 90's and 2000's. Madison Avenue was that, too....but at the other end of the 20th Century....until the 60's. 

We don't know if it has that potential any more.