Rahm Emanuel Stars in Taxfomercial!

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has put out a movie promoting a tax, known as a "TIF".

Chicago Reader's Ben Joravsky tells it straight:

I got an e-mail from a reader telling me: you've got to see it to believe it, but the city made a movie about TIFs.

So I went online, and sure enough—there it is on YouTube for the whole world to see. They call it "What's a TIF?" Think of it as sort of a fantasy action flick, minus the action and heavy on close-ups of Mayor Rahm Emanuel appearing very solemn as he pledges to look out for the taxpayers.

Even as the tax increment financing program robs us blind.

Of course, it's all about Chicago style public-private corporate cronyism that steals from the residents of Chicago and gives to the Chicago connected. In the taxfomercial, Emanuel calls it a "contract" with the people of Chicago, though it is a contract they didn't agree to, nor can they opt out. Bottom line: It's another criminal plot among the elitist.

Here's Joravsky with more of the details:

In short, the most important thing that any Chicagoan needs to know about TIFs is the last thing Emanuel, Holt, or any other mayoral aide will tell you: it's a property tax hike, stupid...

It's also true, as Holt says, that shortly after taking office Mayor Emanuel appointed a TIF task force to look into reforming the program. But the mayor larded that task force with enough yes-men and -women that it wasn't inclined to recommend any real changes. And so the mayor gives himself credit for reforming something that he never really reformed.

You have to admit, he's pretty clever.

Not to bore you with specifics, but one of the TIF program's greatest flaws is that the lion's share of money supposedly intended for the poorest of the poor goes to the richest of the rich, making it a classic case of reverse Robin Hood on steroids.

Neither Mayor Emanuel nor his task force made any attempt to correct this flaw. In fact, just last month the mayor called a press conference to proclaim he was proudly reviving the River Point TIF deal. That's a stinker left over from Daley in which the city will hand over $29.5 million in property tax funds to some of the world's wealthiest developers, who clearly don't need it, since they're some of the world's wealthiest developers.

In turn, the developers will construct a 45-story office building, for which there is no demand, on the banks of the Chicago River in the West Loop, a high-end neighborhood.

Here's the taxfomercial: