Lack of Details, Lack of Clarity, More Attacks from Todd Stroger

April 28, 2009 by Tony Peraica
Filed under: Reform, Spending, Taxes, Todd Stroger

Todd Stroger continues to deal with the scandal regarding the departure of his cousin/county CFO Donna Dunnings, as the Daily Herald reports this morning that his administration has now been subpoenaed over the matter by the Cook County State’s Attorney.

But Todd also took some time this last Sunday to appear as a guest on ABC 7 Chicago’s “News Views” program.

In addition to defending himself over the Dunnings matter, he also shared some interesting statements in defending his massive county sales tax hike - and attacking me for wanting to fully repeal that tax increase.

In particular, he attacked me for “not caring” about the county’s health system, and that the system would collapse without the tax increase. Obviously, this is a comical attack at best, with the tens of millions of waste, fraud and abuse that has been uncovered by my office and local news organizations over the past year.

On this very Web site, we have shared stories and evidence of millions in wasteful spending.

But rather than own up to the waste - Stroger would rather attack me (and keep on spending our money.)

Stroger also fails to discuss how the county plans to keep tax revenues flowing with the slowed economic growth that will be caused by the tax hike. Loss of business, consumer spending and jobs equals loss of tax revenue. He still (falsely) believes that he can tax his way out of an economic crisis.

History proves him wrong.

In his interview, Todd once again claimed that federal stimulus money is what is allowing him to proposed a miniscule .25 decrease in the sales tax increase. However, there are serious questions about whether he is allowed to use stimulus funds to do this - or, if as several commissioners have pointed out - stimulus funds are only supposed to go for new projects.

That being said, in a recent press conference, Stroger couldn’t even pinpoint ballpark ranges of stimulus funds that might be coming in to the county - and could not provide a dollar-to-dollar explanation of how those funds could be used to rollback a portion of the sales tax hike.

Once again - we saw a lack of details, lack of clarity and cheap political attacks from Todd Stroger.