Trib: Don't blame us for Fair Tax flop
After egging on Republican anti-taxers, newspaper edit board insists voters alone sank graduated income tax
A flier for Republican candidates Tom McCullagh and Gretchen Fritz called a graduated income tax a “progressive retirement tax,” an outright misstatement of the truth. For the record, both McCullagh and Fritz lost their races. (Facebook)
By Ted Cox
Remember the kid who said, “He made me do it?”
Well, the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board is turning the tables on him first by saying, “It’s not us. They did it.”
The Trib, a historically Republican newspaper (and proud of it), ran an editorial Thursday, aghast that Gov. Pritzker had called out the GOP for sinking the Fair Tax Amendment in the November election. Putting textual air quotes around Pritzker’s blaming “Republicans” for the loss of the referendum, it called that “a galling attempt at blame-shifting by the governor.”
It wasn’t us, the editorial insisted. “The people spoke. They knew exactly what they were doing and to whom they were sending the message. To imply they were bamboozled by ‘Republicans’ is an insult to the 3,059,411 who voted against your plan — with intent.”
This from a newspaper — and an opinion page — that granted abundant space to anyone using any argument against adopting a graduated income tax in Illinois. It would worsen Illinois population loss. It would lead rich folks to leave the state. It would hurt small businesses. It would lead to a tax on retirement income.
All of which were pure speculation. All of which were debunked on this website.
Then there was that tried and true if nonetheless specious argument repeated Thursday in that same editorial: that a progressive income tax would “make tax increases easier to implement,” and that “middle-income residents would be targeted sooner or later. Probably sooner.”
This in the face of a University of Illinois at Chicago Government Finance Research Center study earlier this year, which found that, throughout the 2010s, tax brackets in a graduated income tax were not altered more frequently than a flat tax, quite the contrary, and that when they were altered they were more often lowered than raised.
Look, it’s not our intent here to rehash the election. The 60 percent supermajority required to alter the state constitution just to allow a graduated income tax was never going to be an easy reach. Proponents of the amendment probably took it for granted that their common-sense approach — with rates initially raised only on the top 3 percent of taxpayers — would just naturally be enough to convince voters. State Rep. Will Guzzardi of Chicago did a splendid job of assessing the blame — on both sides — in a recent post mortem interview. He also pointed out that not even President-elect Joe Biden got 60 percent of the vote in Illinois.
Or, to fall back on the enduring words of California politician Dick Tuck: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”
But it’s disingenuous of the Trib to be shocked, shocked to hear that “Republicans” bear part of the responsibility. Senate Minority Leader Bill Brady made it clear at the City Club of Chicago in 2019 that a progressive income tax “must be defeated” at the ballot box. Top GOP fundraisers Kenneth Griffin and Richard Uihlein bankrolled the TV ad campaign that spread lies about the tax’s impact on retirees and small businesses. And, as seen at the top of this story, other Republican candidates took to calling it a “progressive retirement tax” in campaign fliers.
With so many Republican attempts to sow confusion and distrust in the process, it was equally disingenuous for House Minority Leader Jim Durkin to argue shortly before the election that “if someone’s confused and they can’t tell whether or not which side is making sense, (that’s) all the more reason to say that, ‘I’m not ready to vote for this,’ and they should not because this is a very complicated issue.”
We laid all of this out in an article that ran two weeks before the election on the “shadow politics” in the tax debate. It quoted UIC Professor Christopher Mooney as saying, “Between Trump and Bruce Rauner and demographic shifts in the state, the GOP as a competitive force in the state has really been decimated — and really ‘destroyed’ I think is not too strong of a word.”
The Fair Tax Amendment, then, provided “a chance for the Republican Party to have a win in Illinois in 2020, the year they’re not going to have a lot of joy. … But this is only because the party’s not on the ballot. … The reason they might have success here is nobody knows it’s their thing.” Mooney suggested Republicans were flying “under the radar” on the issue.
The Fair Tax Amendment is “a chance for the Republican Party to have a win in Illinois in 2020. … But this is only because the party’s not on the ballot. … The reason they might have success here is nobody knows it’s their thing.”
UIC Professor Christopher Mooney (Zoom)
And the Trib edit board is still trying to fly under the radar, even when everyone can see and hear the plane right overhead.
The editorial took umbrage at Pritzker’s charges about “Republican” electioneering on the tax debate, but it didn’t bother to mention why the governor took offense in the first place. He pointed out that, in this fiscal year alone, the state was facing a $3.9 billion budget shortfall, $2 billion of that in lost tax revenue attributable to the pandemic and the economic slowdown brought on by mitigation measures to slow its spread. The $3.4 billion to be provided by the progressive tax would have gone a long way to fill that gap.
But, before COVID-19 hit, it was originally intended to address decades of government mismanagement. Pritzker pointed out that many state programs were “notoriously hollowed out” under Gov. Rauner and his predecessors, both Democratic and Republican, with state government employment down a quarter from where it stood in 2000. The number of state troopers fell from 3,000 to under 2,000. He chided how state spending on public education remains “among the lowest in the nation.”
The Illinois budget and social services were long ago cut to the bone. So in effect the governor demanded of Republicans who sank the tax, where would you cut? Higher education? That’s one sure way to speed the so-called Illinois exodus by driving our most promising students out of state. And while he didn’t go into additional details, the indictments were obvious. Scuttle the Child Care Assistance Program, the way Rauner tried to? Cut enforcement at the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency? Because state residents haven’t yet suffered enough long-term effects from exposure to carcinogens like ethylene oxide. Cut funding for the Department of Natural Resources? Because there’s nothing Illinoisans like more than arriving at a state park only to find the entrance chained due to lack of staffing.
The alternative on the other side of the ledger is to raise taxes on everyone, as designed under a flat tax, which no one ever wants to do, which is the very root cause behind what the Trib labeled “Springfield’s longstanding, inept fiscal leadership.”
You don’t have to be governor of Illinois to feel the desperation. The state needs to provide essential services to its citizens, especially in a pandemic, even as COVID-19 robs it of the revenue to do so. In the General Assembly, just as in Congress, politicians need to put the people first for once and do what’s right. The progressive income tax was an attempt to provide that funding, and it failed. So where do we go from here? That’s the question we should all be attempting to answer, no matter our political affiliation. Let’s all stop pointing fingers and instead work on the people’s business.
But we remain haunted by a quote from longtime state Sen. Denny Jacobs of East Moline, who having retired bemoaned how voters always want additional services but rarely support the taxes to fund them. Or, as he put it: “Oh, they want the stuff. They don’t want to pay for it.”
Twas ever thus, it would seem. Again, the people have spoken. Just don’t suggest for a second that they weren’t swayed by arguments — both honorable and cynical — in the political arena.