In the past several months Jan Flapan has learned more than she ever wanted to know about unpaid bills. “It’s not just the Chicago schools. There are 84 small [Illinois] school districts in worse financial shape than Chicago. There are 10,000 people waiting for help with substance abuse. There are more than 14,000 waiting for mental health care. There’s $30 million in federal job-training funds that didn’t come to Illinois last year because the state didn’t appropriate the matching funds. I was reading in the paper this morning about the Department of Children and Family Services not keeping its promises to the judge–well, they can’t without more money. State public universities have raised tuition 400 percent to make up for reduced state support, making college less accessible.
Instead of everybody paying 3 percent of income, those with higher incomes would pay a higher percentage. Exactly how much higher would be up to state lawmakers: in the example the coalition uses, households earning over $75,000 would pay 5 percent and those over $ 100,000 would pay 7 percent. The vast majority–92 percent of Illinois taxpayers–would pay no more than they do now.
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Income tax relief for the working poor, and no tax hike for the middle class, and money for social services, and no more unpaid state bills! It sounds too good to be true. It is.
The advocates’ own arithmetic makes this clear. Progress Illinois says that its 3-5-7 example of a progressive income tax would raise an additional $ 1.1 billion. But that would only be enough to catch up with current unpaid bills, with no porridge left for the nursing homes and universities and abused kids and dopers looking for treatment. Flapan says, “We aren’t denying that something has to be done about spending too,” but the organizations that have joined the Progress Illinois coalition agree only on the single focus of their campaign.
Public opinion–in the absence of much public debate so far–seems to be on the coalition’s side. According to Ellen Dran of Northern Illinois University’s Center for Governmental Studies, 52 percent of Illinoisans randomly polled last fall supported a graduated state income tax and 45 percent opposed it. The poll had a 3.5 percent margin of error, but Dran says the difference is statistically significant.
Still, the potholes in Progress Illinois’ political road are plentiful and bipartisan. With a May 1 deadline for action this year, time is short. And both sides have reason to be reluctant. Republicans have an ingrained resistance to any tax change that could conceivably be portrayed as an increase. And Democratic strategists, as Illinois Public Action’s associate director John Cameron points out, are especially concerned about tax-sensitive swing districts in the legislature. “We have to make the political argument to house leadership that it’s good politics to be for tax fairness.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Peter Hannan.
