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Brandon Johnson's budget proposal only worsens Chicago's financial situation
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s 2026 budget sends an unmistakable message: For residents, new reasons to leave; for outsiders, new reasons to stay away. For job creators, the message is even clearer — we will tax you out of Chicago or out of existence. Meanwhile, for the city’s poorest residents, there is almost nothing of substance.
A budget built on short-term gimmicks
Facing a $1.16 billion budget shortfall, Johnson proposes to raise roughly $617 million through new or increased taxes and fees, while declaring a record $1 billion in one-time tax-increment financing (TIF) surpluses — about $520 million of which will go to Chicago Public Schools (CPS). That will bring CPS’s share of supplemental TIF revenues to nearly $1.8 billion over two years, on top of its nearly 60 percent share of regular property taxes.
Stripped of its rhetorical packaging about “equity” and “investing in people,” this budget is an assault on employers. Johnson revives a modified business “head tax,” raises taxes on cloud-based services, places a per-user tax on social media companies, and adds a new tax on motor vehicular traffic.
There is nothing “progressive” about taxing employers for hiring people or penalizing residents who rely on computers for work and everyday life. Chicago already has one of the nation’s highest tax rates on cloud-based services, and this plan only drives more jobs and investment away. All taxes are ultimately paid by consumers, and when costs rise, economic activity falls — strangling the very revenue the city depends on. You cannot tax your way to prosperity.
While Johnson boasts that there will be no city property tax hike, his handpicked Board of Education quietly passed a $233 million property tax increase for CPS. Over the past two years, CPS property taxes alone have grown by $363 million. This increase occurred despite nearly $900 million in TIF windfalls, including the new surplus embedded in this budget.
Johnson touts $200 million in “cuts;” however, his spending reductions are largely cosmetic. The city’s overall spending has ballooned from $9.7 billion in 2019 to $16.6 billion in his FY 2026 budget — a staggering 70 percent increase. Beneath the pile of new taxes, the mayor orders the police department to cut $92 million, undermining public safety and contradicting his campaign promises not to “defund” police.
Johnson also slashes $140 million from pension funding despite the city’s fire and police pensions nearing insolvency and recent legislation significantly expanding Tier 2 pension costs — adding an estimated $11 billion to city liabilities.
Meanwhile, Johnson reverts to the destructive pre-2015 practice of borrowing for operating costs, planning to issue $166 million in debt to cover retroactive firefighter and paramedic pay — an approach once widely derided as fiscally irresponsible.
The mirage of “progressive” spending
To bolster his progressive credentials, Johnson earmarks revenues from his new taxes for narrowly targeted programs, making it politically risky for aldermen to oppose them. Nevertheless, he is merely continuing existing spending on community-violence interventions and youth recreation programs.
In truth, the mayor’s “progressive agenda” is largely illusion. Johnson has reopened only five of the 12 community mental health clinics closed a decade ago and promises just three more this year. His widely advertised youth summer jobs initiative only restores pre-COVID participation levels. Notably absent are meaningful investments in job training for dropouts, the chronically unemployed, and those returning from incarceration.
The mayor's oft-repeated claim of 10,000 affordable housing units in the pipeline has been debunked. Chicago issued only 4,039 residential building permits in 2024 — including just 321 single-family homes — while cities such as Houston issued over 52,000. After 20 years of housing mandates, only 2,798 affordable units have actually been built.
Chicago’s affordability crisis is worsening as rents have risen 23 percent since 2019, and property taxes continue to soar. The reality: Most of the mayor’s $324 million in housing subsidies have produced a mere 505 affordable units.
Prioritizing migrants over residents
Between 2022 and 2025, Chicago’s migrant crisis has cost nearly $300 million in city spending, with the state’s contribution pushing the total above $600 million. This at a time when many neighborhoods lack basic investments in safety, housing, and education. Johnson has routinely attempted to explain city expenditures on migrants by painting the crisis as a byproduct of “racist U.S. foreign policy” — a divisive and unserious argument.
Before the migrant influx, Chicago’s Black population had already fallen to its lowest in a century — with 265,000 Black residents leaving between 2000 and 2020, most of whom are middle-income families with school-age children. CPS now enrolls barely half the number of Black students it did in 2000.
CTU: The real winner
The true beneficiary of Johnson’s budget is the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) — his closest political ally. Barely a day after Johnson pledged to direct $522 million of his TIF surplus to CPS, the CTU-controlled district demanded another $1.6 billion from the governor and the Illinois General Assembly.
CPS now spends over $33,000 per student, employs one staff member for every 7.3 students, and maintains 23,000 more non-teaching employees than teachers. Yet, union leaders demand even more. There is nothing progressive about a system that has abandoned academic standards, re-embraced social promotion, and denies poor Black and Latino children alternatives to failing neighborhood schools.
The wrong priorities
Johnson has already started blaming “Trump budget cuts” for Chicago’s fiscal woes, calling the city’s financial hole “the Trump deficit.” This is cynical politics. Federal cuts are not the cause of Chicago’s fiscal implosion. Decades of reckless borrowing, outsized pensions, and runaway spending are the cause of Chicago's fiscal dislocation.
This budget does nothing — absolutely nothing — to stop Chicago’s downward spiral. It will burden struggling families, punish employers, and accelerate the exodus of middle-class residents and taxpayers. Those left behind, overwhelmingly poor and minority, will continue living in unsafe, unaffordable, and disinvested neighborhoods.
The mayor’s fiscal blueprint isn’t progressive — it’s regressive, reckless, and a betrayal of Chicago’s future and all but the mayor's far-left progressive allies.
