As of July 1, the city of Chicago now has the highest tax rate of any major city.  The general sales tax on all nonperishable goods was raised to 10.25%.  Illinois sales tax law mandates a general 6.25% sales tax, with 5% going to the state, 1% going to the city, and 0.25% going to the county.  Chicago is permitted to charge additional sales taxes on top of this level.  In addition, Chicago has an incredibly convoluted list of other random taxes that can be found here.  There is, for example, a $1 tax on every new tire sold, and an additional 1% tax on food and beverages sold in the downtown area.

It is easy to lambaste such a list of taxes as being arbitrary and excessive, when in fact there may be legitimate reasons for having obscure taxes to correct specific externalities.  It is also easy to accuse the local government of inefficiency and waste.  But while I am often sympathetic to higher taxes, I sincerely doubt that Chicago's taxation can be justifiable.  Firstly, although any large city needs to have many services to support infrastructure, education, and the urban poor, other major cities like New York City, Los Angeles, or Boston do this with a lower level of taxation.  It is not clear that Chicago does a better job than any of these other cities at providing basic services.  In fact, there is evidence that it may do a worse job: the city's notorious experiences with police brutality and public housing are just a couple examples.  Additionally, although governments are always accused of inefficiency and corruption, there is very strong evidence that Chicago is more than a standard deviation or two above the mean.  The fact that the second Richard Daley is now in his 6th term is alone cause for some concern, aside from the regular charges of corruption levied against his administration.

Beyond the simple question of whether taxes need be so high, there is the question of whether they are assessed in the correct manner.  This is largely a normative issue, but it is worth describing so that the reader can form his own opinions.  There is considerable economic evidence that consumption taxes are favorable to income taxes.  So Chicago has done well in this regard.  For whatever reason, people in the US generally favor a strongly progressive tax structure.  Chicago's tax code would seem to be quasi-progressive.  Since poor people spend a large amount of their income on food and consumables, which is taxed very minimally on average (the rates are very complicated: I pay a tax on some food items, none on most food, and a different tax rate on soap, and a different tax rate on clothes), they pay very little in taxes.  The middle class spend most of their income, but much of it is spent on non-perishable goods.  The wealthy have a much higher savings rate than other income brackets, so they probably pay a lower effective tax rate on the middle class.  On the one hand it is surprising that the middle class would pay the highest tax rate, given that this is generally politically unpopular.  On the other hand is should not be surprising because they are probably the most politically under-represented income group in Chicago.

My final critique concerns transparency.  As I have already alluded to, Chicago has a very convoluted tax code, with multiple tax rates applying to different items in different places.  One of the benefits of having a consumption tax is that they are generally very transparent to the consumer.  But this benefit is largely lost in the Chicago system.  It is unlikely that most taxpayers know all of the rates for various items.  I spent about 30 minutes looking for a comprehensive listing of sales tax rates, and it was not even clear to me what the structure was.  Moreover, the tax code is frequently irregular and irrational.  The city charges a $0.05 tax on every bottle of water sold, but a 13.25% tax on soda.  It is completely unclear why one is an excise tax and the other is an ad valorem tax.  If the motivation for the law were to internalize environmental externalities, then both would have a similar tax, with soda perhaps taxed at a higher rate.  But a $0.50 can of soda has a $0.07 tax, while a $0.50 water has a $0.05 bottled water tax plus a 2.25% tax of about $0.01 cents for a total of $0.06 tax (such prices are attainable by buying in bulk).  

It would be interesting to see what the economic effect of Chicago's taxes are.  Unlike a state sales tax increase, municipal sales tax increases may actually have an even more adverse effect on local economies.  It seems that the costs of moving a business across a city boundary or opening a shop in across the street from Chicago in Evanston instead of in the far north side are much less than moving a business to another state.  Since businesses can keep all of their same customers and employees by relocating or expanding just outside Chicago instead of just inside, the economic effects of local sales tax hikes may be as negative as they come.  Indeed, this event would serve as a very interesting natural experiment to test the effect of sales tax on economic activity.  I'm sure this has been done before, but perhaps not on the municipal level where sales taxes are generally not levied.

And I have found the best tea I have ever tasted:

And I have sampled one of the best inexpensive Earl Greys I have ever tasted:

In fact, this Earl Grey was one of the top 5 Earl Greys for under $10 / 100g at the World Tea Championships.  If you value good tea, you should buy it from these people.

--David Brooks, "Obama's Money Class"

To be honest, I have no problem whatsoever with the Obama camp being driven by the interests of Goldman Sachs or the University of California.  At least the resulting policies might make an ounce of economic sense or have a modicum of intellectual coherence.  At least it's better than having the interests of Halliburton running the country.

Zooming in to a smaller scale, I experienced a similar quizzical sensation, happening across a Northwest-style coffee shop in the middle of the most godforsaken corner of Hyde Park and Woodlawn, between train tracks and a giant steam plant.  Run by a sort of quasi-socialist co-operative, the Backstory Cafe not only sells coffee brewed in some kind of fashionable method using ceramic filters, but loose leaf tea, mango lasses, and fine pastries.  

In the cities of the Northwest it is almost inconceivable that a respectable neighborhood not have a coffee shop--that is, a coffee shop that is not merely a Starbucks to which people drive to pick up their drinks and immediately leave.  Rather, these places are where one can go to pleasantly sit, read, study, or chat for awhile, having a tea or a coffee and maybe a scone, late into the night.  And I mean good tea, good coffee, and good scones.  There are places in Hyde Park that are crude approximations of this cultural phenomenon, but none of them are really satisfying.  The best of the shops at the University is undoubtedly in the Reynolds Club, but its tea selection is anemic, and its potentially lovely ambiance is frequently corrupted by unfortunate alternative "noise" of hipster appeal.  The tea is all Twinings tea bags, which are far worse than popular opinion always seems to judge: being from England and having pretty labels simply cannot salvage mediocre tea bags.  The only other extant competition is the Hookah Lounge.  But even the (idiotic) cultural cachet of shisha again cannot rectify mediocre food and second-hand smoke.  In short, nowhere in Hyde Park is good, and while a couple places are vaguely fashionable, fashion is stupid and can't make the deficient sufficient.

So with high hopes and this reservoir of gastronomic frustration, I trekked over to the Backstory Cafe to try it out. Despite being the most bizarre location, the place was quite nice and bright.  I decided to put them to the true test by ditching the tea (which looked very good), and ordering a mango lassi for $3.  Unlike many mango lassis these days which use syrups and bastardized ingredients, this one used nothing but yogurt, a little milk, fresh mango, and ice.  It was theoretically the perfect solution to a hot day.  And it was pretty good, not outstanding, but enjoyable.  The real problem, as I learned when I bought a couple of mangos last week, is that one can't buy good ripe mangoes in Chicago at this time of year (or perhaps ever?).  There are cheap, underripe ones, which have a nice tart flavor, but it's no substitute for the real thing--particularly in a lassi.  So we can give them maybe a B+ for effort and a B or B- in actuality.  Good, but not superlative.  It is certainly an improvement and a step in the right direction, but it is no Intelligentsia or Tea Gschwendner.

"Here Adam, you should have some."  He offered me the cigarette.

"No Ben, I don't smoke."

"Neither do I," he retorted.

"Then what are you doing now?"

He sighed.  "Adam, having a cigarette every few weeks does not make me a smoker."

"And yet you are smoking now."

He sighed again, shaking his head at my uncultured substitution of rigid definitions for socially constructed ones.

While Ben's subsequent critique of my nonsmoker status was predictably specious, some of the other pages in his blueprint for my intellectual and moral modification have been better-founded.  His criticisms of my historical ignorance and anti-social binges are probably legitimate.  Even his 4 AM existential critique of my faith in absolute truth might not have been completely farcical.

But there is one realm in which I decided to given the Ben Field approach a try. I have long harbored a weird sort of instinctual elitist objection to popular culture.  But wandering around Hyde Park apartments late at night with the likes of Ben, I have noticed that the same people who argue about Hegel and Hume and Heisenberg segue freely between these giants and the tabloid gossip of tween stardom and Hollywood rumors.  It is not so good to have to whisper into the ear of an astonished friend, "Who is Jamie-Lynn Spears?" in the middle of a lighthearted debate round.

So popular culture matters because one needs it to participate in the social discourse, and one needs to be able to debate.  That much is certain.  But does it have any other value?  After conceding to Ben's analysis, I though about this for a long time.  I thought there might be hope.  Smart people would not mistake nothingness for somethingness.  I read some Vanity Fair and thought about it a bit longer.  Then I looked back to Frankfurt's seminal essay in the study of bullshit.  While popular culture is neither concerned with persuasion nor any sense of truth-seeking, its blatant superfluousness and lack of any objective except perhaps self-propagation suggests that it is some class of bullshit.

So popular culture is not important.  But one ought to know it.

And here I am, reduced by Ben Field to consume bullshit.

Someone convince me that I'm wrong.

--Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

--Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

Writing a paper on Mein Kampf turns out to be one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had.  It's not the rhetoric of obscene racism or anti-Semitism that's bothersome--I'm around enough Singaporeans and self-deprecating Jews for that to both me.  Quite simply it is that nothing actually makes any sense.  It's a pastiche of almost-arguments that flounder in a contradictory morass.  Once realized in this light, it is difficult to decode from the text what the motivations or justifications for this doctrine of racism were.  It's so absurd that one frequently comes across a line like the one above, which caused me to burst out into hysterical laughter.  Of course in context that was terribly inappropriate, but I think the world would be much better off if people demanded a bit more rigor from others and took things a lot less seriously.

Notice that if you substitute dog breeds for the word "German", "Nordic-Germanic", etc. in the above sentence, the sentence becomes indistinguishable from a normal statement made by a somewhat zealous dog-breeder.  No one should be capable of taking such sentences seriously.

The more interesting question, however, is how such a feature would change the social dynamic of Facebook.  One could envision the mere act of visiting a person's profile assuming a social significance similar to the wallpost.  Or perhaps the feature would be relegated to the same level of social triviality as becoming another user's friend on Facebook.  At any event, it would almost certainly increase the level of paranoia, which would probably be healthy for most users--and extremely entertaining for me.

--Alec Brandon, on our walk back from the Pierce Tower at 4:30am.