May 22, 2020

By: Matt Rodewald, Director of Communications

Many of us have noticed during the COVID shutdown one thing about life at home. If you’re a parent, you’ve certainly figured out the one tough thing. If you’re trying to work from home and keep your kids on track with online learning, it just feels impossible.

Your house is a mess.

It’s a disaster in every room. Clothes on the floor. Toys everywhere. You haven’t done the dishes. Who knows when you did laundry last. Forget the yard work and maybe that smell that you’ve been wondering about is the takeout food in the fridge you promised yourself you’d get to. That was two weeks ago. 

Trust me, you’re not going to eat it.

You know that moment where you see how bad it is and you say to yourself, “I can’t live like this?” This is that moment for Illinois. When you tax and spend your way into a corner, and you go groveling to the federal government for a bailout. It’s embarrassing to hear your neighbors across the Cheddar Curtain say “clean your house!” It’s embarrassing because you know it’s a mess and you’ve been looking for motivation to clean it up.

Wisconsin lawmakers (43 of them) chimed in this week on Senate President Don Harmon’s proposed $41 billion bailout with a letter to their two US Senators saying don’t help “our neighbors to the south have spent decades spending and borrowing recklessly.”

They’re right. Why should Wisconsin taxpayers pay for that? Illinois lawmakers have made awful choices and the most dangerous one is waiting for all of us in November. The Pritzker Progressive Tax will add a burden to 100,000 small businesses that won’t just make our house a little more messy, it will burn the house to the ground. Businesses closed. Jobs gone. More people leaving.

Pritzker promises the wealthy will be the ones paying more, but Illinois will be paying for it when all the wealthy folks leave the state in droves to a cleaner house. A nicer house. One that probably has a smaller property tax bill too. 

Illinois lawmakers on both sides of the aisle should get together and vote to pull the Pritzker Progressive Tax off the ballot when they return to session next week. They should do it because they all can smell the leftovers of a bad deal when they passed it a year ago.

Repealing the Pritzker Progressive Tax won’t save them the embarrassment of having Wisconsin lawmakers call them out for “reckless budgeting.”

Instead it will save voters the trouble of having to clean up their mess for them.

Take action and sign here to demand Gov. Pritzker remove the graduated income tax from the ballot in November. 

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