Cook action sends message on taxes

It may prove to be more symbol than substance, but a very attention-getting symbol it is.

On Tuesday, the Cook County Board, all too often a body that merely shifts to the will of President Todd Stroger, risked angering its chief - "I cannot imagine being this upset again in my life," he would say Tuesday afternoon - and repealed the 1 percentage point sales tax increase it installed a year ago.

The board's action is clear evidence of the political beating commissioners have been taking over the past 12 months. Tax increases are never popular, and tax increases in the midst of the worst recession in a quarter century or more are built to inspire outrage.

The key problem for Stroger is in persuading the public that Cook County operates as lean and efficiently as it could. But for the county board president and the nine commissioners he's usually able to swing to his way of thinking, almost no one believes that is even remotely true.

So, when Stroger says - as he does in a release promising to veto Tuesday's action - the rollback will cost the county $245 million this year and force the closure of at least one hospital and numerous health clinics, the promise comes across much more as mean-spirited political browbeating than sincere worry.

The fact is Stroger should quit playing the health-care card and instead focus on cooperating with all elements of the county and the county board to shape a budget that truly fits the ability of the taxpayers to fund it.

No one doubts that managing a significantly leaner county budget will be difficult. Suburban commissioner Greg Goslin, an opponent of the tax increase from the outset, acknowledges that "this is going to force some really creative budgeting over the next six months."

But creativity is the order of the day for everyone. It's the order of the day for the struggling families of Cook County and for small businesses watching their livelihoods being siphoned across county borders where sales taxes are lower. It's the order of the day for wage earners who, if they're lucky enough to have held onto their jobs, have watched their incomes steadily erode. It must also be the order of the day for government.

That message also must go out throughout the state after Tuesday's vote in Cook County. Gov. Patrick Quinn, who proposed a 1.5 percentage point increase in the state income tax, seems to think his proposal is somehow different from Cook County's. The size of the nearly $12 billion shortfall in state coffers, he says, demonstrates an urgency he doesn't see at the county level.

Voters are not likely to see it quite that way. The four Cook County Board members who surrendered their support of the tax hike Tuesday know that only too well. We wish Stroger would see it, too, and withhold his promised veto. Failing that, his opponents may not, it seems, be enough of a force yet to override him and repeal the tax hike.

But they certainly send a message to other tax-hungry politicians in these hard economic times.