In defending his highly controversial proposal to impose a $21-per-month tax on the number of people big companies employ in Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson likes to emphasize that the 100-employee threshold he is supporting confines the tax to a small fraction of the private-sector employers operating in the city.

Johnson told reporters last week, “We’re talking about 3% of companies who will be asked to put more skin in the game; 97% of businesses won’t be impacted by this.”

That assertion is misleading on a number of levels.

The most basic of those levels is that it is in the city’s interest to encourage at least some of those 97% of “unaffected” businesses to grow to the point where they’re providing jobs to at least 100 people in Chicago. This tax would do precisely the opposite: it

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