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News > In the Headlines
Thousands of schoolteachers marched in the streets of Springfield on Wednesday in support of increasing funding for Illinois public schools this year. Teachers are not the only folks clamoring for more money. From foster parents to workers who care for people with disabilities, plenty of people can make a case for needing better funding. Of course better funding means one thing for certain - higher taxes. And while a tax hike is not a certainty this spring, it certainly is looking likely. Most years, the argument begins with whether or not government really needs to hike taxes or whether it should try to curtail spending. Seldom is spending really curbed. But often the legislators and governor settle for nibbling around the edges. Some new fees here, some borrowing, some natural revenue growth, some abracadabra moves with pushing current bills off to future years. This year has a different feel to it. While Gov. Rod Blagojevich's mother of all tax increases proposal got shelled from all directions, few critics went so far as to suggest that a tax increase was not needed. The question this year is not if we will have a tax increase, but rather what tax to increase and by how much. Not long after the teachers chanted and marched down Second Street to the Capitol, Speaker Michael Madigan told a business group a tax hike is needed, but added that business concerns about Gov. Rod Blagojevich's gross-receipts tax are "valid." "I said that I think we're going to need a tax increase, and that's as far as I'm going to go," Madigan said after addressing the business group. But it really isn't as far as he went. Madigan scheduled a meeting of the House as a committee of the whole to consider Blagojevich's "tax fairness plan." The plan would raise $7.6 billion by taxing most transactions of businesses with at least $2 million in revenue. Blagojevich has pushed the proposal as a way to get "big business" to pay its fair share of taxes. Critics, however, point out that as it is currently structured, it would affect far more than the "fat cats" Blagojevich has referred to. They say it would likely drive some businesses out of Illinois and that the average consumer would be hit hard by the tax as it would be passed on. A stealthy, and mega sales tax increase, in effect. "These are all valid points," Madigan told the business group in his speech. So Madigan has set the stage next Wednesday to begin tax talk in earnest. Sixty-one of his House members - mostly Republicans but also nine Democrats - have already signed onto a resolution saying they will not support Blagojevich's GRT. Does that mean the GRT is dead? Hardly. The governor's people put a news release out this week noting that truly large companies with revenues in excess of $50 million would pay more than 80 percent of the GRT tax. That's starting to sound like a compromise. Maybe the threshold for the tax gets raised a whole bunch and the expectations get reduced a bit. Madigan says he wants the tax-hike talk to take place in a "full and open process." That alone would be a major change, especially for Madigan, the mystery man with so much power who far more often works in the shadows. We hope it will be an open process. And we hope it will take into account more than chant-ing teachers. Maybe it is time to raise really tough questions, such as why spending more than $20 billion a year on education in Illinois is not enough. Let's seriously ponder and answer that question before deciding how to tax people for billions more. Can we approach education-funding equity and improve health-care access without bankrupting the populace? |
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