‘Pole Tax’ Repeal Effort Gets High-Profile Backer: Stormy Daniels

One year after she became a national political figure by filing her lawsuit against Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels used a share of her newfound political capital by showing up at the Illinois state capitol last Friday to protest the state’s seven-year-old “pole tax.” Imposed in 2012, the law slaps a surcharge on all patrons of strip clubs, with the revenue supposedly going toward programs for aiding victims of sex crimes and reducing rates of sexual assault.  But the law applies only to strip clubs that serve alcohol. “If you’re going to sell sex and alcohol, then bad things sometimes happen,” said the bill’s sponsor, Democratic State Senator Toi Hutchinson, at the time. “I’m hopeful they’ll work with me to take some of the stink off their name.” In the version of the law that went into effect, for strip clubs—or the companies that own them—the surcharge was dropped to $3 per patron from $5 in the original proposal, but companies could also opt to pay a flat fee calculated by their capacity and revenue. But two years later, the “pole tax,” which supporters claimed would bring about a million bucks per year into state coffers, was topping out just about $400,000 per year. Clearly, clubs were opting to pay the flat rate, which came to about $10,000 annually per club owner—because according to calculations by The Quad City Times, if they were paying the $3 per head rate, the clubs could be averaging just 10 customers per day, seven days per week. Daniels, in her appearance at the Illinois capitol in Springfield Friday, objected to the law’s drawing a connection between sexual assault and stripping, according to an ABC 7 News account.  "There is no evidence, whatsoever, linking strip clubs and strippers with rape,” Daniels said in her brief speech. “There is, however, lots of evidence linking clergy, and especially the Catholic Church to rape.” Hutchinson, however, claimed that the law she sponsored was not trying to draw a direct connection, saying that the law does not assume that all strip club patrons are sexual abusers—making an analogy with gambling casino patrons who are not all compulsive gamblers.  “But we do use the revenue from that to work on gambling cessation things and we use money from cigarettes sales to deal with Medicaid costs that have connected costs like that,” Hutchinson said, quoted by Illinois News Network.  The state senator added that she would be “happy to have a conversation with anybody about whether or not that’s an appropriate tax, especially if you’re willing to join the conversation about how to fund these centers.” In Fiscal Year 2018, the tax brought in $448,483, the state’s revenue department said. That’s down from the high of $532,271 in 2016. Photo By Showtime The Circus / Wikimedia Commons