Water, Wal-Mart, and Reverend Wright

Bottle-y harm — This is so predictable (HT NixGuy):

Revenues from Chicago’s new bottled water tax are trickling in — at a rate nearly 40 percent below projections — exacerbating a budget crunch that has already prompted Mayor Daley to order $20 million in spending cuts.

January collections were $554,000. That’s far short of the $875,000-a-month needed to meet the city’s $10.5 million-a-year projection.

If form holds with previous attempts by state and cities to enforce cigarette and liquor tax enforcement, the city will:

• require that bottled water be purchased only in the city.
• station police outside the Wal-Marts in the nearby suburbs to track and bust city residents who buy their water elsewhere.

Speaking of Wal-Mart, though Mayor Daley vetoed the “big box” ordinance that would have required stores like Wal-Mart to pay above-market wages and benefits in September 2006, the city’s clear hostility has led the company and other big-boxers to build stores just outside the Windy City in inner-belt suburbs, attracting much business from city residents.

The city’s hostility to the big boxes is a three-fer going the wrong way:

• It doesn’t get the benefit of jobs inside the city.
• It doesn’t get collect bottled water taxes when city residents buy their bottled water at the inner-belt Wal-Marts.
• It imposes the higher costs found in non-big box stores on elderly and other less-mobile residents, many of whom would greatly benefit from the substantial savings (see Update 2 at link) the big boxes offer.

Cruise through the church bulletins of the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), and you’ll find that one of their pet causes was the aforementioned big box ordinance, and that the church has been, and still may be, a big supporter of boycotting Wal-Mart. The Reverend Wright’s “compassion” thus works directly against the ability of many in TUCC’s congregation to meet their basic needs.