Money has to come from somewhere to maintain state government services

It’s going to get interesting to see how much the rhetoric gets ratcheted up in coming weeks with regards to the state’s income tax.

QUINN: Doing right, if unpopular, thing?

That’s the one that got increased a few years ago, with the concept written into the language of the law that it was an increase ceasing to exist at the end of 2014.

MEANING, IF THE General Assembly and Gov. Pat Quinn don’t do something specific to extend the life of the increase, the income tax will revert back to its previous level (5 percent to 3 percent – remember the infamous “67 percent tax hike” talk).

Of course, there have been many occasions in the past where “temporary” tax hikes became permanent, or at least extended for another length of time.

As I have written before, I fully expected this particular tax increase would become permanent. I never expected the Legislature to allow it to wither away with inaction. I’m braced for this particular tax hike.

Even though the conservative ideologues are trying to make an issue by campaigning for allowing the increase to wither away. And Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, has said he does not right now have enough votes in the House to actually approve a bill that extends the life of the income tax increase.

WHICH IS WHY we’re getting the rhetoric from government types who want the increase to remain in place.

I still have my copy of a list from the Illinois Senate Democrats telling me exactly how much money each public school district would lose in state aid – IF the state budget suddenly took a big hit financially.

WHITE: No more renewal notices?!?

Get the educators convinced they’re about to lose even more in state funding than they’ve already been getting cut in recent years, and you can be assured they will be a faithful force in favor of persuading legislators to vote “aye” on a measure related to maintaining the income tax at its current level.

Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White last week added to the talk by telling how he’d have to cut the number of facilities where one can get, or renew a driver’s license.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, HE’D also have to cut back on those notices his office sends out each year to remind people that the license plates on their cars need to be renewed.

OGILVIE: Quinn hopes to avoid fate

Along with the notices every four years telling them their driver’s licenses are about to expire.

Personally, I’d like to think that’s something people ought to keep track of on their own. Although I’m sure some will gripe that without such a notice, they can’t be expected to know on their own when they have to renew.

Will we suddenly get an increase in the number of people with expired license plates or driver’s licenses who will complain that “It’s not my fault!” when they get pulled over by police and ticketed?

I’M NOT SURE how this issue is going to be resolved – other than to know that by month’s end it will be over.

A part of me believes that the Democratic Party leadership that runs both the Illinois House and state Senate will manage to use their power to persuade/pressure/twist the arms of legislators to approve the income tax continuation – which is desired by Quinn.

Which is all the reason why Republicans will spew the rhetoric – if they can derail a Quinn desire, they can make him look weak and ineffectual. And if they can’t, they will try tagging him as the guy who got both an income tax hike AND a property tax hike in Chicago!

Bringing back memories of Bill Ogilvie – the one-time governor who lost his re-election bid for having the nerve to do the right thing in creating the desperately-needed state income tax to begin with.

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Will Cellini trial get the short shrift?

Federal officials began the process Monday of picking a jury for the trial of Springfield business executive William Cellini, yet I wonder how many people have any sense of whom he is.

CELLINI: Boss behind the bosses?



Because thus far, his trial is turning out to be the circumstance that is causing other trials to be delayed.

FIRST, THAT OF former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. And now, Tony Rezko. U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve on Monday delayed the sentencing of the man who was supposed to be capable of taking down the political careers of  Blagojevich, Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama.

So we’ll have to wait until November to find out what eventually will happen to Rezko – who in the end didn’t have much of an effect on Rahm and Barack. And Milorod seems to have gone down to legal defeat without any input from Antoin.

All of these political people are the “big names” who are overshadowing Cellini. I’m sure there are many people who are observing this whole situation and thinking that Cellini is some sort of afterthought.

Which is a mistake!

WHENEVER PEOPLE ASK me who Bill Cellini is, or why is he significant, I always use the overly-simplistic explanation of telling them that Cellini is the guy who has the ability to tell the elected officials what it is they will do with their political positions.

Because on paper, he doesn’t come across as much. He used to hold positions in state government (the first director ever of the Illinois Department of Transportation) back in the days with Richard Ogilvie was Illinois governor.

OGILVIE: Gave Celllini his only post



In recent years, he has been the treasurer of the Sangamon County Republican Party. Which means he’s not in charge of the GOP in Springfield and its surrounding rural towns.

But he’s the guy who controls the money and has the institutional memory. As a result, he’s the guy that the party chairmen usually turn to when they need “advice” about what to do.

AND BECAUSE HE’S a prominent Republican in the Illinois capital city, the state legislators and other officials turn to him. Even the Democrats. Because Cellini isn’t somebody who feels the need to play ideological politics – which is why the biggest Cellini critics these days (the ones most eager to see him carted off to prison) are the ideologues.

The ones who scream “RINO” and complain that Cellini isn’t a real Republican because he’s willing to work with Democrats in state government when they manage to get themselves elected to political positions. Because they don’t want to accept the idea that people of the two major political parties (along with those of other ideological persuasions) really do have to work together if we’re to accomplish anything as a society.

This is the guy who wound up helping Rod Blagojevich to raise the money he needed in order to beat Jim Ryan in 2002 and annihilate Judy Baar Topinka in 2006. That Cellini-raised money was the reason she could never truly rebut all the nonsense rhetoric Blagojevich spewed during that campaign.

As for Jim, perhaps the reason Cellini was willing to back Blagojevich was because the Ryan campaign of ’02 was based too strongly on the concept of “It’s my turn,” rather than offering any vision for Illinois.

IT ALSO RELATES to the actions that federal prosecutors say amount to criminal behavior. For the trial that likely will take up the bulk of the month of October says that Cellini’s behavior in getting contributions from a would-be Hollywood producer amount to extortion. The old shake-down.

BLAGOJEVICH: Cellini-raised cash

Of course, there are those who are skeptical of these charges, saying that they are closely related to actions for which other people were already acquitted. Hence, there are some who think Cellini could be the lone individual in this latest federal investigation of state government corruption who could be found “not guilty.”

And I’m sure if that happens, there will be those people who will argue that it was Cellini’s cunning and cleverness that somehow managed to allow him to elude a criminal conviction.

Or maybe it just means that his behavior was business, and not criminal. And that the only thing he might be “guilty” of is associating with sordid individuals.

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Will income tax issue become a 2010 campaign issue dangling from Quinn neck?

Richard Ogilvie is the last Republican to serve as Cook County Board president, and also was a corruption-fighting county sheriff who rose through the ranks of politics to become our state’s 35th governor.

Yet the only thing many people old enough to remember his days in government back in the 1960s and early 1970s have to say about him is that he’s the ba$#@&d who had the nerve to raise our taxes.

IT’S TRUE. OGILVIE’S one term as Illinois governor was the time when Illinois imposed its first statewide income tax. This state went for more than 140 years without such a tax.

The intellectual type political observers will note that state finances were a mess, that the income tax was necessary and that it would have been fiscal irresponsibility to not support creation of the tax.

It didn’t matter. That tax made Ogilvie politically vulnerable the same way a heavy snowstorm took down the Chicago mayoral aspirations of Michael Bilandic just a few years later.

He lost in 1972 to Dan Walker, who gave Pat Quinn his first position on the state government payroll. And now, Quinn appears willing to follow in the footsteps of the man who ran against his one-time boss in that long-ago election cycle.

QUINN IS NOW admitting that now-impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich was correct when he said the Legislature without him would be inclined to raise peoples’ taxes. Not that anybody cares.

The statement issued by Blagojevich on Friday that basically reeked of an “I told you so” attitude was treated as the rants of a lunatic – rather than anything to which serious attention should have been paid.

Quinn last week said his budget proposal for the state fiscal year beginning July 1 would have to have something that produces serious amounts of extra cash – or else there would have to be massive cuts in everybody’s spending.

On Sunday, he said during a WGN-AM interview that an increase in the income tax that has its historic origins in the Ogilvie administration is the “least bad option” to balancing out a budget.

HE ALSO ENGAGED in the rhetoric used by any political person when a tax increase of any type is being considered – he tried to give the impression that this is a tax increase on somebody else, but not on you.

“Families that are middle class, I think, will have no higher taxes or lower taxes,” Quinn said during his radio interview.

So this is a tax hike purely for the wealthy people of Illinois. It’s a nice piece of rhetoric. I’m just not sure what to think of it until I know a specific definition of what constitutes “middle class” as opposed to “wealthy.”

One observation I have made during my years as a reporter-type is that everybody thinks THEY are the norm of our society. If only everybody else were just like them, we’d be just fine.

AND NO MATTER how much income one has, it is the people who make more than them who are wealthy. Even if they are wealthy, they don’t think they should be put into that classification.

So there are going to be many people who will grouse and gripe when they come to realize that in the world of Pat Quinn, they are the rich who will have to “pay up!” in order to help the state balance out its financial situation.

If the Chicago Tribune has managed to report accurately, Quinn on Wednesday in Springfield will say he wants a 50 percent boost in the personal income tax rate (from 3 percent to 4.5 percent). Quinn has implied he views an imcome of about $56,000 as the cut-off point.

In short, I can picture a lot of people just barely over that level who will say that the struggling economy ought to be a time to give taxpayers a break financially. They are going to raise a stink.

I REALLY WONDER how many members of the Illinois General Assembly will have the nerve to vote “yes” for this Quinn proposal, because they’d be risking their own political futures. I can already envision the Republican rhetoric of next year – Democrats are the party of corruption and higher taxes.

It may be ridiculous, but the current political climate of Illinois is ridiculous enough that many people may be inclined to believe this.

Even if the Legislature does manage to rebuff Quinn on his desire for the income tax increase (similar to how a then-Republican Legislature dumped on former Gov. Jim Edgar’s late 1990s hope to revamp public education funding), would the voters still hold it against him.

Could this be the issue that ensures Quinn gets to do nothing more than finish off the final two years of Blagojevich’s second term as governor?

IF ANYTHING, I’M going to be paying special attention in coming months to the public and private actions of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, the woman who reportedly wants to run for governor herself someday and whom some consider to be Quinn’s major competition come next year’s elections.

Will she become the vocal opposition of a tax increase – even though the state’s finances are enough of a mess that no one (outside of the anti-tax extremists such as Jim Tobin – does he still do his “Tax Villain of the Month” releases?) would argue that the state doesn’t need the money.

Because if she plays this situation properly, this could be what ultimately results in her getting the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor come 2010, and allows her to overcome any “impeachment related” tendencies of the Illinois electorate to vote Republican.

In short, Quinn may be giving the attorney general the political ammunition she needs to ensure that we get the sight of “Gov. Lisa Madigan” taking the oath of office on a cold day in January, 2011.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: We’ll learn for sure on Wednesday what Pat Quinn has in mind (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/03/quinn-calls-tax-hike-least-bad-option.html) with the state’s income tax and resolving the more than $9 billion shortfall the state faces for 2009-10.

Richard Ogilvie’s legacy, as laid out (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE7D71039F932A25756C0A96E948260) by the New York Times.