After Their Tax Increase, WI Gov. Begs Illinoisans To ‘Escape To Wisconsin’ Where Taxes Are Actually Higher
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on January 14th, 2011 5:38 am by HL
Wisconsin’s new Republican Governor Scott Walker has rushed to make hay out of the Illinois Assembly’s decision to raise individual and corporate tax rates, urging Illinois residents and businesses to move to Wisconsin. But, ironically, Illinois residents who move to Wisconsin should bank on paying higher taxes.
Conservatives like Walker have insisted on using the figure that Illinois is increasing taxes by a whopping 66 percent. While this is factually accurate, it’s misleading as it makes the tax increase seem much bigger than it actually is. Illinois tax rates will only go from 3 to 5 percent (hence 66 percent increase), representing a total increase in tax rates of just 2 percent. This will allow Illinois to solve a massive $15 billion budget deficit without gutting state programs. But even with this increase, tax rates for individuals will still be lower than in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has different tax brackets; the lowest income rate if you make over $11,000 is 6.15 percent. The highest rate is 7.75 percent. Bloomberg noted this yesterday:
Absent from Walker’s sales pitch was the fact that Wisconsin’s top income tax rates remain higher than Illinois even under the increase … Walker hasn’t yet proposed lowering the state’s income or corporate tax rates.
But this didn’t stop Fox New host Neil Cavuto yesterday from insisting that Illinois is experiencing a “tax storm.” Nor did it stop Walker from calling on Illinois residents to “escape to Wisconsin”:
CAVUTO: That storm [blizzard in the northeast] is nothing compared to this one – a tax storm and in Illinois a big one. Democratic Governor Pat Quinn is set to sign a 66 percent hike in the state’s income tax… Governor, what do you make of this?
WALKER: Well I got a simple message… I pulled this out of the archives, we used to have this for tourism, its a bumper sticker that says “escape to Wisconsin.” And instead of sending it to tourists, we are going to send it to employers, because boy with their taxes going up through the roof we want them to come to Wisconsin…
Watch it:
Instead of following the responsible budgeting in Illinois, Walker is proposing to increase taxes on the working poor in Wisconsin by cutting the state’s earned income tax credit.
Tennessee Tea Party Demands School Curriculum Not Focus Too Much On The ?Minority Experience?
Tennessee tea party activists presented state legislators yesterday with a list of “demands” for the 2011 legislative session, which opened earlier this week, including, “educating students [about] the truth about America.” “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States,” according to a document the two dozen activists distributed to reporters. “We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”
What “truth” do these conservative activists demand be taught? Apparently it doesn’t involve portrayals of the “minority experience” or anything else that might taint their mythical hagiographies of the Founding Fathers. At a press conference, the activists said they want a focus on the “progress” the Founders and “the majority of citizens” made, to the exclusion of supposedly “made-up criticism” about slavery and the treatment of Native Americans:
The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”
Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.
“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds
It’s unclear what these activists think is “made-up” about the very real history of slavery in America or the very real intrusion on Native American lands by early American settlers.
This effort could be dismissed as a the work of handful of obscure activists in Tennessee were it not part of a much larger conservative attempt to rewrite American history without all the unflattering bits. Like their supposed reverence for the Constitution, when conservatives speak warmly of American history, they tend to pick and choose only the parts which reflect their contemporary world-view — and they are equally eager to sanitize the parts that do not.
The Founders should indeed be praised as visionaries, but they were humans and thus fallible products of their time. Any attempt to white-out the darker parts of their history does a disservice to the “truth” these tea party activists claim to promote.
