By Ted Dabrowski | Wirepoints
If you’ve been in Illinois long enough to go through a school district tax hike referendum, you’ll understand what’s going on right now as state lawmakers prepare to vote on the 2025 state budget.
In those tax hike referendums, local residents are often faced with threats from school administrators that go something like this: Support the multi-million property tax increase or else face cuts to popular activities including art, music and sports. The tactic works, as all too often voters give in to the false choice. (Real spending reforms, like cutting administrative bloat, are never offered.)
Gov. J.B. Pritzker is doing a version of that right now with state lawmakers who don’t agree with the nearly $1 billion in tax hikes he’s put into his proposed $52.7 billion budget. The governor wants to hike sports betting taxes by $200 million. He’s pushing for another $500 million from tax hikes on companies. And there’s another $93 million tax hike on ordinary residents. The governor is not allowing the individual income tax standard deduction to fully rise with inflation.
To get his way, the governor, via his proxy Sen. Andy Manar, has sent out a letter to his agencies and lawmakers that effectively says “vote for the tax hikes or I’ll cut your district’s grants by $800 million.” Those are grants in the budget, typically of several million dollars, that lawmakers get for their districts to butter up their voter base. If those grants get cut, those lawmakers can become targets. As the Belleville-News Democrat reported: “While Manar’s letter was addressed to “Agency Directors,” it was just as much a message to rank-and-file lawmakers – particularly those within the supermajority Democratic party.”
Pritzker has given his Democratic allies the same false choice that school district officials often give their residents. You choose. Tax hikes or cuts to popular programs.
Where’s the harmony we’ve seen in Springfield for the last five years, you ask? That harmony was never real, but rather the result of the nearly $200 billion in covid aid that flowed into Illinois’ private and public sectors over the last three years. The windfall tax revenues into the state’s coffers gave Pritzker and his Democratic supermajority huge freedom to spend and harmonize. It’s what allowed the budget to jump from just $40 billion in 2019 to over $52 billion today.
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More here.
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