A tax on bottled water? A proposed 10.5% sales tax in Cook County? When does it stop?

Mayor Daley has even been quoted as saying:

"I'm open to more innovative ideas on things to tax..."

Wouldn't it be cool if we could fund the Chicago Public Schools with something other than taxes?

Local businesses spend money to advertise. One day, all that money they spend will be with companies located in Silicon Valley. Our local economy will be devastated when all this money leaves the state and never comes back.

According to 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth:
• Each year, 100 million trees are used to produce junk mail.
• 250,000 homes could be heated with one day's supply of junk mail.
• Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail every year.

• The yearly production and disposal of junk mail consumes more energy than 2.8 million cars.

Books, shoes, computers, and blenders.

You’re probably pretty good at finding dirt cheap products on the internet, right?

What about oil changes, dry cleaning, yoga class, and tomorrow’s lunch?

The internet doesn’t mean much to you when it comes to shopping locally. You can’t really use the internet to find where today’s cheapest gallon of milk is, can you?

Imagine if you could find every lamp on sale in Chicago as easily as you can find the “mail order” ones online?

T-shirts, chocolate bars, silent auctions, and bake sales.

We've all sold this stuff to raise money. The big problem is that as soon as it's over, you have to start thinking about what you're going to sell the next time around, and how you're going to hit up the exact same people again and again.

It's too much work. It's too hard. And non-profits go under ever day because of it.

But aren't your supporters more loyal to your non-profit than they are to a TV show, or Hollywood, or Google, or junk mail, or to the newspaper?

Want to save money? Who doesn't. Want to save money while bringing sustainable prosperity to Chicago? Even better. Citizenpowered seemed like the perfect place to start a blog about SaveChicago.org. Our new company launched two months ago and the main thing we've learned so far is not to try to tell the whole story all at once. So, a simple introduction is in order, wouldn't you say?