The Oak Park senator in 2013 promotes taxes as fiscal solution, but fudges on what to call them

2nd installment, Short History of Oak Park, Vol. 2, The Donald and the Clothes Horse etc. . . . 

We left the Senator at the Carleton Hotel, June of 2013, assuring Oak Park's Business and Civic Council and other concerned citizens that the fiscal crisis in Springfield was being overblown by over-zealous Republicans.

The senator continued in a vein of all-conquering optimism with praise for the January 2011 temporary income-tax rate increase -- from 3% to 5%, which he helpfully explained was a 2% raise, though "Republicans [the rascals!] say 67%."

He also helpfully ignored well known Republican outlets such as Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, and Huffington Post, each of whom called it a 66% raise, the latter unconscionably adding that it was a "massive increase." Conspiratorially.

So what? The senator had something else in mind, a "fair tax" -- higher rates for higher earners -- that would satisfy budgetary and vote-getting needs simultaneously. He was being clever about it, rebranding the graduated or "progressive," tax, with its venerated soak-the-rich flavor.

Next day, in the (Springfield) State-Journal Register, he struck the still-hot iron with a thumb-in-eye comment declaring himself "not surprised" at Republican opposition to his proposal, introduced a day earlier, on the last day of the session.

After all, he said, Republicans are beholden to "the more well-off," for whose interests they would be expected to "step up," so as to "perpetuate an unfair tax." By Jove, a talking point!

And a hijacking in broad daylight, as it happened, of a term in use at least since 1999, when Congressional Republicans proposed a national sales tax to replace the IRS. File your returns on a postcard, the proposers predicted.

The term was familiar also to people who paid attention to presidential-campaign discussion in 2008, when it was discussed, and remained in 2013 the goal of Americans For Fair Taxation.

The senator's fair tax was nothing like that, of course, but imposed according to income (same-old, same-old), not spending. It was "progressive," its rate rising with taxpayer's income. Punishing success, say opponents, spreading the wealth ("You didn't build that,"), say Democrats, who normally rejoice in the word.

Not this time. Indeed, the senator showed trail-blazing mettle in scoring not only budgetarily and politically with his "fair" tax but also lexicographically, deftly changing the word's accepted meaning -- a sort of Humpty-Dumpty maneuver -- "When I use a word, . . . it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." The senator did it for marketing reasons, he was to acknowledge in a later forum.

His 2% did not pass muster for one listener, as he explained in a letter to the Oak Leaves, the longer-standing of two surviving Oak Park weeklies.

"In a finance-centric discussion replete with bar graphs, pie charts and other data points," the man wrote, "[the senator] repeatedly referred to the income tax hike as a two-percent increase. At the same time, he dismissed those (including our Republican friends) who referred to it as a 67-percent increase.

The senator, however, "either . . . has a tiny hole in his grasp of math or . . . is reluctant to acknowledge the difference between percent change and percentage point change.

"Starting at 3 percent and then going to 5 percent is a 2-percentage-point increase. But it's a 66.7-percent change."

Right. The senator from Oak Park, a home-grown product in his 12th year as senator, still had something to learn about the village's people, in this case whether he could get past them with word games.

-- To be continued --

Short History of Oak Park, Vol. 2, The Donald and the Clothes Horse: Senatorial splendor, House Decoration -- the Town Hall Trail, June to October, 2013

The Donald of Oak Park, its senator in Springfield, where he's high in the ranks of the Ruling Party and is smooth-as-silk boss of Oak Park's Democratic Party organization, took to the podium at Oak Park's Carleton Hotel on a glorious day in late June of 2013 for his annual report to the Business and Civic Council. 

It was time to explain things to bankers, business owners and operators, and other issues-aware citizen consumers and taxpayers with skin in the game to varying degrees and/or psychic income from allegedly progressive political victories and enactments.

The state was in a state of turmoil, confusion, and all-around hyperactivity. The two legislative chambers were at odds over a pension solution. The governor, a one-time gadfly with Oak Park roots, was soon to cut off legislators' pay checks to punish them for inactivity.

For the Donald, however, it was what-me-worry time. "The sky isn't falling," he intoned, no matter what Republicans said. Falling or not, government had been "cut to the bone" to keep it from doing so. 

Pension payments, where his votes are, not fiscal problems that threaten far more than pensions, were the issue. Illinois "has never missed a pension and never will," he said. Saving the state, fending off mediocrity for all and sundry except the very well-to-do? Not the issue.

The long haul had no appeal. In the long run, we'll all be dead, he might have said, echoing Lord K., the apostle of deficit spending. Focus on the immediate particular, in this case the budget, his comfort zone. One just passed paid the pension for the coming year. He was comfortable with what he and his fellows might achieve in the immediate future. Leadership here, vision too. Yay.

Legislators "kind of solved the pension problem with the 2010 reform" anyhow, he said with a small grin. Yes, the 2010 reform. It tightened benefits for new hires and left the pension only partly funded. ("'Tain't funny, McGee," Fibber's wife Molly used to say on the radio.)

Don't blame Democrats who run the show but couldn't agree on how to fix pensions. It was a matter of "honest, principled differences." Oh those honest, principled Democrats. When will we see such another? Their differences were enough to bring things to a halt, but not to worry, sky not falling.

-- to be continued -- 

Middle class, middle class, where art thou? Democrats ask

This middle-class business is the current touchstone for Illinois Dems. 

Whatever happened to poor people? asks a Wed. Journal of Oak Park & River Forest reader of the very busy Sen. Don Harmon of Oak Park.

What about the poor, Senator ? The Rauner budget hurts the poor even more than the middle class. But no politician speaks for the poor! The cuts to basic services for the poor are creating extreme hardship and suffering. . . . 

Harmon had talked middle-classism up in a Wed. Journal column.

I'm working on a solution [he wrote] to provide tax fairness for the middle class. My solution is a fair income tax, one where higher rates would apply to higher incomes and lower rates would apply to lower incomes. It's logical and allows middle class families to keep more of their hard-earned money. 

Other references dot the landscape of his column: "working families . . . regular families . . . real families" and "middle class" itself four times, including this amazing rhetorical judo move, following a litany of complaints about Rauner's plan:

That's class warfare, aimed squarely at the middle class. The only people who benefit from Gov. Rauner's agenda are his corporate pals.

No high-school debater ever did better. This Democrat knows class warfare when he sees it. 

Harmon was on message, one that he was pushing mightily, an agenda embodied in a series of "Middle-Class Agenda" proposals billed as alternative to Rauner's "turnaround agenda." (From what to what is at issue here.)

This agenda has no surprises for most Illinoisans who read newspapers.

The legislation would boost the state minimum wage, give tax credits for college costs, guarantee up to seven paid sick days for full and part-time workers, cover two years of tuition and fees for eligible community college students, and end business tax breaks to save Illinois $334 million.

Familiar enough. But poor people?

Not in the present equation, which calls for getting a budget passed that defeats Rauner. Dems are fast on their feet, thus the current pitch. 

Last time around, in the general election a few months back, Rauner had the winning message. Dems are trying to poach on that, of course. 

So they push this middle-class emphasis, ad nauseam for people who remember their poor-people emphasis of not so long ago. Light on their feet they are.

Chi Trib leads editorial cheer for Rauner . . .

. . . in full throat, and to good effect.

Dear Gov. Rauner: You may be the last, best chance to protect Illinois' future. . . . . The spring session has been Madigan and Cullerton's time. Now it's your time. You come across as a patient man who knows he was elected to govern for four years, not just the first five months. You also come across as a focused man. A governor who won't flinch.

 This must gall the hell out of Dems. In his town hall sessions in 2013, the heart of a book I am putting together about Blue Illinois as argued by Ruling Party minions, Sen. Don Harmon of Oak Park took early shots at the Trib as having "bashed the heart out of us."

Now here the once self-proclaimed "world's greatest newspaper" (WGN was its sister radio and later TV stations), does a great job of taking the fight to the Dems.

Madigan and Cullerton thrive when their foes are playing their game — striving for popularity, arm-twisting for votes, fussing over who wins the news cycle. They do skirmishes well. They haven't faced a governor who does wars.

They "scold you for pitting your demands for . . . reforms against their demands for high spending. Their minions keep whining that the budget process is sacrosanct — you shouldn't use it as a tool."

Perish the thought.

The paradox is that, for decades, they've used the budget as their tool for rewarding and punishing and getting their way. But, as of 2015, a budget can't be leveraged? Is that so.

It can, Trib says, with veto amendatory or complete, even in the face of summer-long resistance or state-employee strike.

We aren't spoiling for a long, hot summer or a strike. But if they come, we trust you'll use the campaign funds you control to explain to the people of Illinois that there aren't enough taxpayers, or enough stupid employers, to stay in Illinois and fund its governments' enormous overhead. Other states offer better cost-benefit ratios — and without all the politicians' relatives on the payroll.

Whoa. Hardball with money. Let 'em read and hear about it. Voters can be persuaded. Pressure can be pumped up. The stakes are high enough.

The Madigan-Cullerton strategy here couldn't be clearer: to obstruct any and all reforms, to vilify you for four years, and to install some malleable flunky in the governor's office.

Rauner is free to sit and watch, "keep calm and stand pat." He didn't take the job to horse around, "but to revive the moribund Illinois of Mike Madigan, John Cullerton and ... their followers."

That's not quite a St. Crispin's Day speech, but it's not bad either. "And their followers" is good. I've watched and listened to some of them barely making sense in meeting after meeting, Impossible, I've told myself. Incredible. The nonsense of it. About which more later.