SmartRemarks

Here’s a man-bites-dog story for you:  on Tuesday in Springfield, capital of our fair state, over 5,000 people rallied in support of a tax increase. 

There’s good reason for this. The state income tax is flat (i.e., regressive) and one of the lowest in the country, at only three percent… and has been kept that way for years, placing political advantage over good sense, as the state has run a chronic structural deficit.

The current economic meltdown has exacerbated that situation to the point where it’s no longer possible to ignore or “fix” with accounting shell games. The state was facing an $11.5 billion deficit for FY 2010 alone. That’s nearly as large as California’s, and nearly twice as bad when measured per capita. Thus, Gov. Pat Quinn (the successor to our illustrious indicted Gov. Blagojevich), who as I have written before is a reformer and basically decent guy who therefore could never have made it to the governor’s office through conventional means, has proposed a painful but fair and prudent solution: some budget cuts (about $1.3 billion, including some layoffs and furloughs), accompanied by a modest tax increase—bumping the corporate rate from 4.8 to 7.2 percent, and the personal rate from 3.0 to 4.5 percent (with the automatic exemption increased from $2000 to $6000 per person). 

Now, you might think that with a Democratic governor, a Democratic state senate, a Democratic state assembly, an obvious emergency on their collective hands, and broad public support, it wouldn’t be too hard to get this passed, right? But this is Illinois.

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Tags: Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Lisa Madigan, Mike Madigan, Pat Quinn, taxes, Todd Stroger