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| llinois residents struggle with new income tax hike |
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SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — As the sticker shock over the state’s eye-popping income tax increase settles in, Illinoisans are figuring out what it means to their lives.
The increase, from 3 to 5 percent, means someone who now owes $1,000 in Illinois income taxes will pay $1,666 at the new rate. The corporate rate makes a similar jump and both drop partly back toward their original level after four years.
Some people express anger and consternation over state leaders letting Illinois slide into a $15 billion budget hole and then asking taxpayers to fill it. Others, however, consider it a necessary evil. They want to make sure Illinois government keeps delivering important services.
Matt Smallheer, owner of an exotic reptile store not far from the Illinois-Missouri border, already knows the price of the tax increase: His pay raise. The O’Fallon business has grown steadily in the nearly five years it has been open, but Smallheer hadn’t given himself a raise the last two years. He had been planning on a 20 percent bump as a perk.
But Smallheer, a 28-year-old married father of two, quickly decided against it because he doesn’t want to pass along the cost of a tax increase to his customers. He said he won’t move his business out of Illinois, as some opponents of the tax increase have threatened. Still, that doesn’t make him any less angry.
Classroom sizes expanded at School District 200 in Wheaton. Rumors about cutting arts and music circulated. Bills went unpaid. Staff members were let go. This is why Jeanne Weseman can accept an income tax hike.
“I think it’s really important that this happened, assuming the state is able to follow through,” the 44-year-old mother of three said. “Ask me next year how I feel about it if we still haven’t gotten the money we’re owed.”
Weseman doesn’t expect the tax increase to reverse the cuts at her children’s school or any school around the state. But at least it might stop the bleeding, she said.
John Bruntjen has put one daughter through the University of Illinois and has a son at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield. He expects to send another child off to a state college in five years.
Simply put, the Illiopolis farmer is used to writing checks to the state, but he compares the additional tax money to feeding a bad habit. “This large a tax increase is like cocaine to a drug addict,” said Bruntjen, 57. “Most people don’t see a bright future for Illinois, and we all know it.”
Bruntjen knows corn and soybeans, not economics. He wonders whether politicians in Springfield know any more about supply and demand than he does. He maintains they should have shown more restraint and cut the budget instead of betting on a tax hike.
Bruntjen said he figures there’s only one way to beat the higher income taxes. “I’ll try not to have any income,” he said. |
| 1/19/2011 |
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