Illinois Governor Pat Quinn (no relation) told the City Club of Chicago yesterday that he might be amenable to increasing the portion of the state income tax that Illinois sends to local governments. Most people think that this is a purely political move on Mr. Quinn’s part designed to make it easier for him to sign the pension bill that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel forced through the legislature and that will, as it stands, inevitably involve a property tax increase in Chicago (see my April 19 post, Take It to the Bank: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Will Get His Tax Increase … And Maybe His Casino) and easier for the legislature to make the “temporary” five percent personal and effective 9.5 percent corporate income tax rates permanent. This supposition is largely correct if for no other reason than just about everything Pat Quinn does is a purely political move, but perhaps more on that later. Even conceding this, however, the obvious objection should be something like
Wait a minute!Doesn’t Governor Quinn want to make the “temporary” tax increases permanent because the state desperately needs the money? If we so desperately need the money, how can we afford to send more of that money to the state’s local governments? Conversely, if we have money to send to local governments, do we need to make the “temporary” tax increases permanent?
The Republicans in this state, presumably not being fools (but sometimes one wonders … and digresses), have made that argument, albeit not as articulately as yours truly. But I suspect I have the answer and it lies in Pat Quinn’s wording. He told the City Club:
“I am very open to discussing with our local units of government a way to share some of the income tax revenue beyond what we are today in order to help them with their challenges. At the same time, our foremost challenge is to invest in our education in a fair way that doesn’t starve our education, raise property taxes.”
Pat Quinn (Getty Images )…always generous with your money
Buried in that massacre of the English language lie the words “beyond what we are today.” They hold the key to what the Governor has in mind. Some might interpret these the way the Governor and his minions would like you to interpret them — i.e. money beyond what we share today. However, given Mr. Quinn’s history of always sympathizing with the “challenges” facing government while giving mere lip services to the challenges facing taxpayers, what he really meant, one can be sure, is taxes “beyond what we are today.” Put in another way, he is willing to share additional tax revenues, beyond those collected from the existing five and 9.5 percent rates, with local governments. So Governor Quinn is calling for yet another tax increase, a portion of which will be channeled to local governments in the hope that they will keep property taxes down.
One could perhaps sympathize with the goal of replacing property taxes with income taxes, which has been something of the Holy Grail of Illinois politics for at least 20 years. But people are smart enough (though, again, one wonders given the rogues, clowns, lackeys, toadies, no-account relatives and other hangers-on we elect in this state) not to trust politicians to keep their end of such a deal. Generally, the way these things work is that income taxes go up while property taxes not only don’t go down, but continue to go up as politicians find “urgent needs” that somehow weren’t so urgent until funds became available. In the case of such a deal concocted by Pat Quinn, a man with not even the faintest notion of what life off the public payroll is like, one can be sure that any deal involving a “trade-off” between income and property taxes will come up short on the property tax reduction side.
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