On July 5, the day before the Illinois house at last ended the state’s historically protracted fiscal stalemate by voting to override Governor Bruce Rauner’s budget veto, Rauner came to the far southeast side to play populist in the manner of Donald Trump. Sounding off like a regular guy—droppin’ g‘s left and right—the billionaire governor made like his unwillingness to compromise with Democrats on a budget was about taking a stand for the little guy.
But his anti-tax rhetoric resonates with swing voters who might ordinarily vote Democrat. Hell, I almost always vote Democrat, and I can tell you anti-property-tax talk kind of resonates with me—especially now, having just paid my property tax bill.
As everyone should know by now, the reason property taxes are so high in Illinois—aside from waste, boondoggles, corruption, TIFs, etc—is that our state relies on those dollars to fund our schools. If Illinois had a progressive state income tax, we might be able to wean ourselves off the dependence on the property tax. In fact, this was the argument put forth by the late, great Dawn Clark Netsch in her 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Her opponent, Governor Jim Edgar, painted her as a tax-and-spend liberal. Forced to choose between a politician who tells the truth about taxes and one who doesn’t, the public went with the BS, as it does almost every time, and Netsch lost in a landslide.
“To hell with that,” she says. “I don’t want him in my ward—he’s doing nothing for us. Rauner stands for everything I’m against. And have been against my whole life. This is a working-class ward of unions: firemen, police, teachers, ironworkers, carpenters, painters—you name it. And Rauner’s a union-busting Republican who finances his campaign by writing $50 million checks, and he’s not doing shit for working people.”
