• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Come on over, everybody

Yikes!

Top Illinois Democrats have agreed to push a plan that would temporarily boost income taxes by 75 percent and double cigarette taxes, Senate President John Cullerton said Thursday.

Illinois' personal income tax rate, now 3 percent, would climb to 5.25 percent for four years under the plan Cullerton outlined. After that, it would drop to 3.75 percent.

That means someone who now owes $1,000 in state income taxes would owe $1,750 at the new rate, then $1,250 after four years.

[. . .]

Democrats say they have no choice but to raise taxes as one part of a solution to Illinois' massive budget crisis. The state deficit could reach $15 billion in the coming year. The government is borrowing money to cover some obligations, letting bills go unpaid for months and cutting corners everywhere from state prisons to state parks.

Let us now pause and count among our blessings the fact that we live on this side of the Indiana-Illinois line.

Comments

Kevin Knuth
Fri, 01/07/2011 - 12:45pm

And we owe how many BILLIONS to the federal government right now?

tim zank
Fri, 01/07/2011 - 4:13pm

That's a fascinating question Kevin, please tell us. Oh, and please provide us with a comparison to Illinois as well.
I'm sure the readers here would be interested to know how our state stacks up financially to Illinois. Since you brought it up, please educate us.

William Larsen
Fri, 01/07/2011 - 4:16pm

With the toll road disaster and the unemployment debacle and let us not forget that the property tax reform shifted police, fire and teacher unfunded liabilities at the local level to the state level I would not even attempt to guess how this will affect Indiana taxpayers.

IL may have just been more open on their budget. IN boasts it has a balanced budget, but what it really has is a narrowly identified budget that is balanced leaving out all those nasty unfunded liabilities.

gadfly
Fri, 01/07/2011 - 10:31pm

What toll road disaster are we speaking about, William? it looks to be a good deal so far. I agree that centralized unfunded liabilities is insane, but Karen Golder wants us to believe that our public pension funding levels are far better than . . . states like Illinois and California. Right! I feel better already.

Public employees are entitled to no better pensions than the majority of taxpayers that fund their wages. Private pensions are primarily defined contribution instead of the defined benefit plans paid to public union members. Time to stop the pump, but Daniels will not take on the unions since he is now a presidential candidate.

William Larsen
Mon, 01/10/2011 - 11:32am

gadfly, the $4 billion paid to lease the road for 80 years was invested and from what I read was a lot was lost in junk bonds. Some of it was invested in the GM bonds where were a total lost when GM filed for Bankruptcy and Obama instructed the treasury to somehow supersede bond holders when the GM Bailout was done. Bond holders would have received about 29 cents on the dollar, but actually got zero.

In addition, an 80 year lease when you amoratorize the $4 billion over that period of time means you should spend no more than $101 Million a year adjusted for inflation. If you do, you run out of money before the end of 80 years.

The toll road operators double the toll to travel on it. This increases the cost of doing business as well as shifting cars off the toll road onto SR 120 and SR 20 that runs parallel to the toll road. The state could have cut out the middle man and done the same thing. I have also heard the toll road seen a decrease in maintenance. We could end up with an unusable road in ten years if it is not maintained in this cold snowy environment.

I am not sure what type of bond they put up, but my guess this is a subsidiary that signed the contract, one that does not have deep pockets in order to insulate the money of the people actually profiting from the lease.

Quantcast