Illinois House Overrides Governor’s Veto, Raises Taxes 32%

After going 736 days without a budget, the Illinois House finally pushed one through. This may not be enough to save the state from a junk bond rating. This would make Illinois the first state to ever fall to this rating.

CNN describes the state’s current financial situation as “[remaining] in a financial mess following decades of mismanagement and the recent budget fight. The state has racked up $15 billion of unpaid bills and owes a quarter-trillion dollars in pensions to state workers when they retire.”

In order to pass the budget, the House had to override Governor Rauner’s veto. The governor believes the budget “solve[s] none of the problems” even with the $5 billion of tax revenue to be raised.

It seems that the governor may be correct as Illinois lost more residents than any state last year and the increased taxes could push more people and businesses to depart.

Regardless, the state should not be punishing the citizens of Illinois because of the shortfalls of the government. Those politicians who have mismanaged state funds over the decades should be accountable for the damage they caused.

 

Advertisements

Author: Luke Henderson

Since joining the Libertarian Party in 2016 (after discovering Gary Johnson as a disaffected Bernie Sanders supporter), Luke Henderson has been active in the liberty movement through journalism, and political activism. At the beginning of 2017, Luke had his first piece of writing published by Being Libertarian and quickly became a contributor to the libertarian news site, The Libertarian Vindicator. Through the Vindicator, Luke discovered his passion for addressing critics of the philosophy and bringing together different factions of liberty lovers which compelled him to become an editor for The Libertarian Coalition, a forum dedicated to an open-minded discussion of libertarian ideas from all walks. After many guest contributions to Being Libertarian, Luke was asked to join the website as a contributor, where he writes his column Scoring For Liberty, which discusses sports, politics, and economics from a libertarian lens, and his Educator series that seeks to strengthen libertarian’s understanding of educational techniques and policy to better arguments against public education. Luke is one of the District 1 Executive Committeemen for the Missouri Libertarian party, and the founder of the Missouri Chapter of the Libertarian Positivity Caucus. Outside of politics, Luke is a paraprofessional for the Special School District of St. Louis, a musician, composer, and a loving husband and father.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s