- AP Photo/M. Spencer Green
- Governor Pat Quinn pushed for tax hikes despite the political risks.
“Bigger government means more corruption,” Bruce Rauner says.
Rauner’s not as clever, but he certainly endorses the Reagan sentiment. Which is: government—bad.
Illinois has another major problem besides its budget: great and growing wealth inequality. A report earlier this year by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that the average household income for the wealthiest 20 percent in Illinois is more than eight times the income for the poorest 20 percent, tying the state for the eighth worst disparity nationally. The average income of the top one percent in Illinois—Rauner’s class, and he’s near the head of it—is $1.1 million; that’s 24.5 times what the lower 99 percent average—$44,000.
In 2011, the noted American economist Jeffrey Sachs lamented in the Financial Times that U.S. government programs were being “asphyxiated.” While Republicans were prevailing in their push for low taxes and small government, the U.S. was “vastly outperformed by northern Europe’s high-tax-and-spend states,” he wrote. Sachs went on:
