In DPOP candidate forum right now on Zoom, listening to the questions for the Village President candidates (my turn will come). They were talking about economic recovery and the budget, and I suddenly wondered whether, in the same way the federal government passes economic stimulus packages, that ever happens at a local municipality level.
For example, let’s say that tax levy is 3% normally. Oak Park could, in theory, levy 3.1%, and then take those extra funds raised, and redistribute them as cash recovery grants to the population (like the coming $1400 federal grant, just passed as part of the America Rescue plan). They could just do it directly per person or per household, or target hard-hit businesses, etc.
If I’m thinking about this correctly, it should work out in a progressive taxation kind of way — for individual grants, for example, the wealthy would pay a significant amount, the upper-middle would essentially get the extra tax back in the cash grant, so a wash for them, and the middle-to-low-income would get a significant economic boost.
Maybe it’s not done because it’d be such a small amount of funds transfer, and there’s enough cost to implementing the process that it wouldn’t be wortwhile? Would be curious. Thoughts?
(It’s a good thing I’m not running for Village Trustee or President, as this would be rather a fox among the chickens moment, tossing this question out three weeks before the election…)