MMPI of Chicago is closing in on $100 million kitty thanks to hard-pressed Cuyahoga County taxpayers. Thanks, Timmy and Jimmy.
The Medical Mart quarter-percent tax passed by Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora with acquiescence of Peter Lawson Jones (the guy who can’t take public transportation home but needs a special tax-paid driver) delivered another $2.9 million in May. All for a good cause, right? Wrong.
That brings the total taxes collected for the Medical Mart/Convention Center to $97,359,348.55.
Do you think a newspaper with the resources of the Plain Dealer could tell us just how that money is now being spent? I do. Apparently its editors don’t, however. Because we never get an accounting. Waiting for the FBI, I guess. Twenty years from now.
County taxpayers – really smokers and drinkers – have contributed another $1.6 million in May. That brings the total since August 2005 to $66,233,782.20. A lot of money. But hell we have to help the billionaire Lerner family. Don’t we?
And smokers get hit for another $1.5 million in May for the Arts & Culture tax. It brings the total collected since Feb. 2007 to a cool $62,308,332.51. Think we could get the PD to give us an accounting of how this money has been doled out? Not a chance.
All these taxes by the way are regressive taxes. In other words, they weight most heavily upon those of us with small incomes.
County Commissioners can never think of a luxury tax that would hit the rich for these things they MUST have. Maybe the new reform County government will take a look at how to take from the rich instead of giving to the rich. Nah.
The total for the three regressive taxes, rounded off, is now more than $225 million. You paid it. You should know.
Wonder how many necessary products that would have bought and how many jobs it would have produced if not given mostly to help billionaire sports owners.
Let’s keep LeBron. Doesn’t matter what it costs. We must have him.
Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.
He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991.