By John F. Di Leo
First, the state of Illinois’ new governor signed a record number of tax and regulatory increase bills in Springfield, and then Chicago’s new mayor delivered a State of the City address announcing her plans to do the same to Chicago.
It’s been a good week for the tax collector, the political hack and the bureaucrat; it’s been a bad week for everyone else.
As statewide progressive income taxes - and many other forms of property grabs - loom large on the horizon, the message is clear to any Illinoisan with a house, a job, a business, a bank account, or in fact anything of value at all:
Get Out.
Get out now.
Get out while you still can.
Every household in Illinois has a six-figure debt from pensions alone, and there’s only one way the establishment is interested in addressing it:
J.B. Pritzker and Lori Lightfoot have it in for you, and they both have at least four full years in which they intend to treat your possessions as their own personal source of kindling.
There are real solutions to Illinois’ problems, of course. Immediately correcting the pay scales and contracts of public employees to address the pension crisis… immediately reducing the size of government… immediately ceasing our sanctuary status and ejecting our million illegal aliens… immediately returning to a true criminal justice system in which our state’s criminals are actually imprisoned, instead of being released in a revolving door.
But all proper solutions are off the table, in a state long ruled by a single party that exists only to expand the welfare state, and to reward the ward heeler and the city sealer.
So it’s tax-and-spend, tax-and-spend, on an ever greater scale, as far as the eye can see.
Laboratories of Democracy
Illinois’ effective bankruptcy bears an important lesson to those who have believed in the old “laboratories of democracy” theory, long promulgated by leftists and other fools.
There have always been people – usually teachers – who claim that our nation was meant to be a collection of “laboratories”… fifty different states, each of them able to do whatever they wanted… Big government or small government, socialized programs or private sector solutions… And these advocates never recognized it as an inherent conflict with the policies of our Founding Fathers philosophy.
They were wrong, in so many ways.
America was always meant to be a nation of small government. Government was to be limited at every level - not just federal, but state, county, township, and city as well.
Yes, each state was to have the choice of whether to get there with a unicameral legislature or a bicameral one, or with a stronger governor or a stronger speaker of the house, or with home rule in every city or a wilder collection of unincorporated communities.
But our Founders never intended for some of our states to be essentially unAmerican; our Founders never dreamed that some states would choose massive, costly, overbearing and intrusive government, sure to result in bankruptcies that would infect their innocent neighbors. That was never to be one of their options; in fact, our Founders wrote state constitutions designed to keep it from ever happening.
But it has happened… not just in Illinois, but in many more states as well. And what we have today, by allowing Democrat-run states like Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and California to spend themselves into bankruptcy, has unavoidably become a national crisis, not small localized crises.
These bankrupt states are a drag on the entire nation. Whether they are ultimately successful in convincing Washington, DC to rob the rest of their countrymen to pay off their unsustainable debts or not, these “laboratories of economically destructive policies” have hurt us all.
There is only one way for a nation to prosper, and that is if the entire nation is bound to the same philosophy - the same commitment to small government, low taxes, low spending, and the rule of law.
We simply cannot survive as long as those with suicidal impulses are allowed to pull down their neighbors with them.
Now, on to another subject…. Umm… Know anybody who wants to buy a nice house in Illinois?
Copyright 2019 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance professional, writer and actor. He will next be seen on the stage in Mundelein, in the Kirk Players’ production of the Oscar Wilde comedy, “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” October 4-6, 2019 in Mundelein.
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