State to Raise Gas Tax

“Comparing state spending in fiscal year 2000 with state spending in fiscal year 2019 adjusted for inflation, higher education is down 52%, human services and public safety are down 26%, health care is down 23% and net discretionary spending is down 20%, according to an analysis by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.” Things have already been cut back to the bone, Leslie Venere.

we disagree

Not about the basic facts, I hope.

Mike Wyckoff numbers might be right, but past support has been more than the state could afford. If spending exceeds what money the state has, the state should get spending under control. A pay cut, rather than a raise, would be a good place to start. And what is discretionary spending? Down just 20%? Why does higher education need any money? They should live within their means with the massive tuition dollars they receive. Spending is out of control, Mike, all over the country and those taxes just keep rising.

Fair enough. If those attitudes reflect your values, then so be it. In my view we charge students far too much in the way of tuition and fees to attend our universities. That’s a reflection of the state’s inability to live up to its responsibility to education its citizenry. Tuition is way up because state support for higher education is way down. Our children are not leaving the state to go to colleges elsewhere because our institutions aren’t up to par, but rather because they are underfunded. If we lived in a poor state, I would see things differently. But we live in a relatively rich state (take a look at some state gdp rankings). The wealth is there, but we’re too cheap to invest it in our children.

There are other reasons for the high tuition. Universities make bad spending decisions as well, in my opinion. In many cases, easy money results in bad spending decisions. I guess we will simply have to disagree with one another.

I don’t disagree entirely. Universities spend too much on administrative personnel, in my view. But if you plot state support for higher education over time, the extent to which it’s gone down is striking. You’re a good person to disagree with, I have to say. You’re kind enough to listen to my arguments and point of view. Will let you go, though 🙂 Take care.

Mike, I wish everybody could actually begin to have conversations again. Thanks for the discussion 🙂

Leslie Venere the little tag most relevant only is censorship at its most blatant.

Admittedly they benefitted from a big revenue windfall in April, but for the most part I believe this year’s budget is in balance, no?

The negativity on this issue amazes me. Does anyone deny that the infrastructure improvements are sorely needed? Would you rather they paid for the improvements with smoke and mirrors rather than to honestly and openly raise taxes to pay for them?

They “balance” the budget by counting loans as revenue. The projected deficit for this fiscal year is more than $2 billion

Ant Hony Do you consider your personal budget in balance even if you have a mortgage? Or an automobile loan?

No accountant would claim I was balancing my personal budget if I was going further and further into debt every year.

Every accountant would tell me I’m on the road to bankruptcy

The state doesn’t need more money from us when the can’t manage what they already have. What other wasteful spending programs will be cut for this? How many other “promises”have they broken?

You avoided my question 🙂 Fair enough.

Brian David Look at the data. The state is not a big time spender relative to other states. There is precious little fat to be cut.

Have you even looked at the data? Relative to other states, we spend a lot more money

https://ballotpedia.org/Total_state_government_expenditures

“Comparing state spending in fiscal year 2000 with state spending in fiscal year 2019 adjusted for inflation, higher education is down 52%, human services and public safety are down 26%, health care is down 23% and net discretionary spending is down 20%, according to an analysis by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.” Things have already been cut back to the bone. https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-perspec-zorn-illinois-budget-tax-spend-cut-pensions-20190531-story.html#nt=oft13a-1gp1

Ant Hony Look at the final column in your data. Per capita spending. It supports my point of view. We spend at the same level as Idaho for goodness sakes.

That’s per item spending.

The state isn’t short on funds as any look at state spending makes obvious. The state is mismanaging where the spending goes. I previously provided a source that makes it that extremely easy to see

Per capita spending, we’re the second highest in the region. My source doesn’t support you

Ant Hony That’s PER CAPITA spending, controlling for population size. We’re a large state!

Yes and I’ll repeat myself, Per capita we’re the highest in the region. Only Wisconsin beats us in Per capita spending in the region

Click on the button in that column and it will rank the states by per capita spending. We’re 13th from the bottom. Way BELOW average.

I don’t see how we can argue if we can’t agree on basic facts. The data you’ve provided indicate we are 13th from the bottom in spending. If you think for just a moment about this, you’ll realize there is very little left in the budget to cut.

…and save Wisconsin, our neighboring states are below us on that list. Yet they’re not in bad shape.

Why? They’re not mismanaging their money

You’re picking and choosing one or two states here and there to support a bad argument. Looking at all 50 states you can see that we are quite low in terms of spending. If you can’t see that then you just don’t know how to interpret basic data, I’m sorry.

I’m picking and choosing every state that shares a border with Illinois. Why? Because that’s what economists tend to do as they’re the first choice for Illinois residents who move to another state.

No they don’t. Why in the world would you compare us with Iowa, for example? We’re a large, urban, industrialized state. They’re not. Geographic adjacency is not a particularly good choice for making pair-wise comparisons.

I already explained why. Those are the first choice for Illinois residents to flee to.

Maybe you’re unaware but people are fleeing Illinois. We typically rank in the top 5 states for highest tax burdens. It’s not like we’re competing with neighboring states for residents or anything

Tax increases do not necessarily equate to higher revenue. That’s Econ 101

Okay, so your effort to shift the focus indicates that you have no place to go with this argument. We can argue tax policy next if you like, but please don’t go around telling people that Illinois spends more money than most states. It doesn’t. Thirty-seven states are ahead of us when it comes to per capita spending. Budgets for public education and public services have been cut to the bone in recent years. The notion that we’re a big spender with lots of fat to cut is simply WRONG. Go ahead and argue for your conservative approach to policy, but be intellectually honest about the basic facts.

Oh I’m still on a focus of Illinois managing money. I can explain to you how the state budget works if you need me to. Taxes (which are dependent on people), revenue, and spending.

Again, all of the states that we’re competing with are spending LESS per capita except one.

I’m not arguing a conservative approach to policy (whatever that is). This is basic economics and accounting.

But if you think there’s no where to reform spending, you’re unfamiliar with our budget woes. One spending field in particular is in crisis in Illinois, and will single handedly swamp the budget

Ant Hony Even if I use your questionable methodology and ignore large swaths of data no economist would ignore, here’s here’s how Illinois’ per capita spending compares to other states “in the region” according to your data: Illinois ($5105); Indiana ($4818); Michigan ($5466); Ohio ($5634); Minnesota ($6947); Iowa ($7354); Wisconsin ($8108). According to your data, Illinois spends LESS than most of the states in our region, and overall 37 of the 50 states spend more per capita than we do. Our spending looks, rather pathetically, like the spending in many deep southern states (e.g., Alabama, $5218) that have always under funded things like education, health care, and social services. If you want to live in a state where people don’t often graduate from college, where infant mortality rates are high, where large segments of the population receive inadequate health care, be my guest and go live there.

Mike Wyckoff I prefer they grow the economy and not destroy it. They will get more tax revenue by growing the economy. The same people that made this mess are the ones offering the solution to fix it. Not good

Dan McIntyre I wouldn’t for a second defend Mike Madigan or argue that Illinois government has been well managed over the years. I’m simply trying to make the point that the answers to our problems are not to be found in cutting the budget. There have already been major cutbacks in spending for education, human services, health care, etc., over the past decade. Our universities have been so crippled that students are actually choosing to go to places like Alabama to go to college rather than stay in state. Too many people are convinced that Illinois is a “big spender.” It’s just not true.

Illinois could have a healthy budget with public pension reform and consolidation of school districts. These would bring huge reductions in spending without touching services. Illinois is already in an economic death spiral. Raising taxes chases away people and businesses, which in turn damages the economy, which then reduces incoming revenue.

You pointed out several states that outspend Illinois that have lower tax burdens. If you want to be like those states, our taxes and spending structure should be like those states.

Here’s another factor reducing incoming revenue: the real incomes of most working class and middle income people have flatlined or even declined in recent decades. But the costs of health care, education, and other government obligations obviously have not flatlined, so a regressive, flat income tax structure has not been able to keep up. Under these conditions the shift to a progressive income tax makes a lot of sense. We need to ask those whose incomes have gone up dramatically in recent decades to pay their fair share.

There are two problems with a progressive income tax. It raises taxes on small business owners, and most people in the top 5% don’t pay income taxes. They pay capital gains taxes, Those rare few that do pay income taxes will be further encouraged to leave the state.

Ronald M Lee Ignores that fact that two-thirds of the states use some form of graduated income tax and it seems to work for them. Graduated income taxes are the norm, not the radical exception. Your doomsday scenarios simply don’t play out.

That ignores the fact that four-fifths of all states have lower overall tax burdens

non-sequitur 🙂

You need to find an example of a state with a similar overall tax burden to Illinois. Which is New York state. They tried it, and it made budget matters worse

Hmm … interesting if true. I’ll check it out.

New York is a progressive income tax state. Guess things weren’t so bad that they switched back to flat?

Things are so bad that New York will likely be the first state to go into bankruptcy. You’re new to politics if you think New York’s political class will admit they were wrong, and undo their hard work

Okay, I’m open-minded. Can you point me to a longitudinal study that shows a decline in revenues following the adoption of a progressive income tax?

Yeah, if they don’t start delivering on some of their promises, they aren’t going to have much of a state left to tax

“For every dollar you spend on a lottery ticket in Illinois, 25 cents goes to the state. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you add up the average ticket sales in a year, it can reach up to $700 million in revenue for Illinois.
[…]
About 90 percent, or $630 million, goes into a Common School Fund and the rest to capital projects and other causes supported by sales of specialty instant tickets.

That means when you buy a lottery ticket, about 20 cents of every dollar you spend will go to fund education.”

(That article was from 2016. The 2017 numbers were $720mil for education)

https://foxillinois.com/news/local/tracking-lottery-money-in-illinois-how-much-goes-to-education

Jeff Verzak But is was a shell game. All they did was replace the money from other sources with the Lottery money. They didn’t actually increase education funding.

Stephen Haberkorn correct.