The Senate once again let down the people of Illinois as it passed a $5.4 billion tax hike measure on Tuesday, Sen. Kyle McCarter (R-Lebanon) said.
“This is an omnibus package, but it has a lot things in it that are not good for the state,” McCarter said. “This is not our last effort. This is not the only thing we could do to fix this budget. We should’ve started at the other end of the spectrum. Unfortunately, we did not. We did not start and exhaust all the cuts and the ways of changes and the ways of doing business in the state and end up at an amount of tax increase that could have been much less."
SB9, introduced by Sen. Toi Hutchinson (D-Olympia Fields), would raise the individual income tax rate from 3.75 percent to 4.95 percent, raise the corporate tax rate from 5.25 percent to 7 percent, impose a 1 percent tax on cable TV and digital streaming, and create a separate 5 percent tax on satellite TV. It would allegedly create a $203 million surplus for the state.
Many Senate Republicans joined McCarter in lamenting the bill’s passage, arguing that it was possible to pass a budget and funding bill without raising the income tax, but Senate Democrats refused to take the hard road and taxpayers must now pay the price.
“The question is should we have made more effort or taken an easier way out and just say to the taxpayers, ‘You fix the mess that legislators of the past have created’?" McCarter said. “And I think that is what we are doing here: delivering a punishing tax increase and making the wrong people pay. The citizens didn’t do this.”
McCarter called the bill a punishment of taxpayers.
“There is a lot of blame to go around in this, but the one person who didn’t do this is the taxpayer,” he said. “They paid the increase that you asked them to last time and what happened? Nothing. All we got was deficits. All we got was hundreds of thousands of people leaving the state because they just gave up.”
He predicted that the state will face another mass out-migration
“I predict that that will happen again, and sadly it will be some of your family members; it will be your neighbors; it will be those people you go to church with; it will people that you will miss,” McCarter said. “They will just quit and say, ‘I’ve had enough.’ You cannot keep putting a big [mandate] on people that they cannot afford. We could have done better.”
SB9 passed 33-26, along party lines.
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