House Speaker’s idea tying tax increase to Illinois’ pension debt is ‘tone deaf,’ says GOP leader

(The Center Square) – Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch is floating the idea of revisiting a graduated income tax. House Minority Leader Jim Durkin said that’s deaf to what voters had to say in November.

Welch, D-Hillside, told the Economic Club of Chicago that the state should revisit the income tax amendment that failed in November.

“Sometimes you fail the first time out, you get back up and try and try again, that’s how I’ve always done things,” Welch said. “So I do think that we should probably revisit that at some point.”

Tying it to paying down the state’s $141 billion pension debt is one way Welch said could garner more support.

“Tell the voters exactly how you’re going to spend this new money and they may trust us more because trust is one of the issues that we have with the voters,” Welch said.

Thursday, Durkin, R-Western Springs, said taxpayers don’t trust state government. He said Welch’s plan is “tone deaf” to the vote in November.

“Voters spoke loud and clear about Springfield spending and taxing policies,” Durkin said.

The progressive income tax proposal only got 46.7% of the vote in November. It needed 60% to pass. Several Democratic districts also rejected the proposal, Durkin said.

As to giving increasing taxes to pensions, Durkin said that’s a nonstarter.

“This is not a way to fix the systems,” Durkin said. “You have to reform the systems. Throwing more money at them and asking the public to underwrite the pensions any more than they do is a nonstarter.”

Durkin said the state needs to address the pension protection clause of the Illinois Constitution. He also supports a “consideration model” that passed the Senate several years ago. That idea would give state employees a choice of either no future pay increases factoring into their retirement benefits while keeping the 3 percent compounded increase, or have pay raises affect benefits, but have a lower cost of living allocation.

Illinois spends nearly a quarter of every tax dollar on the state’s pensions, which are $141 billion underfunded.

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