Chicago’s latest budget fight is reshaping who pays more and who gets more inside City Hall, and the balance is tilting toward higher burdens on taxpayers while administrative ranks and salaries grow. Mayor Brandon Johnson is steering a financial strategy that leans heavily on new and higher taxes, even as the city trims frontline positions and faces warnings about its long term stability.
The result is a fiscal blueprint that asks residents and small businesses to shoulder steeper costs while the government’s own bureaucracy expands, raising questions about priorities, competence and the risks of pushing a strained tax base even harder.
Tax hikes pile up as Johnson chases a massive shortfall
The central fact driving Mayor Brandon Johnson’s agenda is the size of Chicago’s budget hole, and his answer has been to reach for new revenue rather than deep structural reform. Reporting shows the mayor confronting a shortfall of nearly $1.2 billion, a gap large enough that almost every major tax lever is now on the table. Earlier, he publicly ruled out a broad property tax increase, but as the deficit persisted, he floated a fresh package of hikes that would touch everything from high end real estate deals to targeted levies on specific industries, a shift detailed in coverage of how the budget is underwater. The message to residents is clear: the city’s structural problems are being addressed first through their wallets.
Johnson’s own budget documents and public pitches frame these increases as necessary to avoid layoffs and preserve social programs, but the scale of the ask is striking. In one major proposal, he called for $617M in new taxes to close the gap and avoid layoffs, a move his own team linked to a “Structurally Unbalanced Budget” and a financial condition threatened by a looming economic slowdown. That framing underscores how deeply Chicago has come to rely on one time fixes and revenue grabs instead of long term discipline, and it sets the stage for the political backlash now forming around who exactly is being asked to pay.
Campaign promises collide with a tax heavy governing style
Johnson did not campaign as a tax and fee mayor, which is part of why the current budget feels like a whiplash moment for many voters. During his 2023 run for office, he explicitly promised not to raise property taxes and blamed steep past increases on his predecessors, a pledge that helped him distinguish himself from more traditional fiscal hawks. Yet the spending plan that City Hall pushed through relies on a series of hikes that collectively add about $165 million in new burdens, a shift captured in coverage of how the Chicago City Council narrowly approved Johnson’s $17.1B budget. That package includes higher levies on everything from hotel stays to targeted business activity, and it has left some of his early supporters wondering how far the administration is willing to stretch its own campaign rhetoric…