Take a Hike

My local cartoon for The Hamilton County Reporter

“SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!” - Cuba Gooding Jr. as Rod Tidwell in Jerry Maguire

The Chicago Bears are taking a hike and the taxpayers of Indiana are just being taken. I will keep this Substack brief because I too am leaving (just for a few days) and I need to pack.

The Bears moving to Indiana has been an on again off again story for months, but Just over a week ago things became more real. The Chicago Bears Board of Directors met and voted to advance the stadium development project in Hammond Indiana.

The state of Indiana has already authorized $1 billion in public funding for the new stadium. The money will be generated by new taxes on hotel stays, food and event tickets in northwest Indiana. There will also be taxes generated through a “Professional Sports Development Area”. This means that some of the taxes collected in the area around the stadium that would normally go into the state’s general fund would now be directed to a special fund that will be dedicated to financing the stadium.

I’ve always considered this tease of moving the Bears to Indiana a bargaining chip to pressure the politicians of Illinois and it still might be just that. Not a single spade of dirt has been turned and the exact site of where that might take place has yet to be decided. Illinois still has time to keep the Bears west of the Indiana line, but not much.

Sketches & sketchy stuff…

With this cartoon I was trying to imagine myself as a taxpayer in the northwest corner of the state. What would my attitude be and what would I be thinking about this issue. Basically I would feel like a pawn in a chess match between billionaires and politicians. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was going to get screwed. I began mentally playing around with various football terminology and when I got to the word “hike” I immediately connected it to taxes as well as football. That was the spark.

From that point I just wrote down various options on what our hero would say that could lead to the tax hike ending. The cartoon was going to lean heavy on the word play and not so much with the visual. I knew that it would be just a random individual, a taxpayer. A worn out taxpayer.

Since the drawing wasn’t doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this panel I wanted it to at least be good. I did several versions of the character looking for just the right one that I was satisfied with. Most of the sketches would have worked fine, but for some reason I like the one I went with best. Sometimes it’s just a gut feeling and this guy had the perfect gut, arms and an expression full of woe. I hope you agree.

I’ll see you when I get back.

Final drawing…

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