Green News and Opinion

For a People’s Budget: Fiscal Responsibility, the Public Good and Fair Taxation
A Green View of the 2007 State Budget - February 15, 2006
By Rich Whitney, Illinois Green Party Candidate for Governor
Last week, I was discussing Illinois politics with a couple of voters in Carbondale, when one of them, out of the blue, said, “I’m not going to vote for any candidate who does not promise to raise taxes.” Her friend agreed, saying, “I feel the same way.”

I turned to them and said, “Well, you’ve got at least one person you can vote for.”

These sentiments are no longer unusual in Illinois. Illinois voters are waking up to the need to save government for the public good.

For years, the conventional wisdom, shared by both Democratic and Republican politicians, is that you cannot get elected unless you promise to cut taxes, or at least not raise them. During the Ryan administration, they did cut taxes – in the form of tax breaks and doling out other special favors for giant corporations and the wealthy. This paved the way for the structural deficits our State has suffered under since 2001. But Rod Blagojevich has been a prisoner of the same conventional wisdom. This “conventional wisdom” wrongly presumes that all the voters care about is themselves; that they are selfish, and that all they want to hear from a candidate is whether he or she is going to lower their taxes, or at least not raise them. It presumes that voters can’t comprehend that if you cut taxes too far, you can end up cutting your own throat, because you have made it impossible for government to serve the most basic public functions.