18 Comments - odd - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 11:41 am: Uh, someone tell DGA the House just went home and session tomorrow is cancelled. - Valvino - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 11:47 am: I’m sure Rauner has not thought of this. If property taxes go down, how are schools and other things going to be funded? Wouldn’t you have to raise sales tax and income tax rates. - Rich Miller - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 11:51 am: ===someone tell DGA the House just went home=== Hilarious. Oops!!! - RNUG - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 11:54 am: == I’m sure Rauner has not thought of this. If property taxes go down, how are schools and other things going to be funded? == By pushing a property tax freeze, the obvious conclusion is Rauner wants schools and local governments cut / defunded. If he truly wanted to reduce local property taxes, he would be calling for a much higher State income tax in exchange for reduced and capped school property taxes. - Grand Avenue - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 12:00 pm: Right, originally, the property tax freeze was tied to anti-union “reforms” that would create the savings necessitated by the revenue freeze, but since the election’s coming up and that “muddies the message” Rauner’s now asking for a “clean” property tax freeze. - Sir Reel - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 12:10 pm: I believe property taxes are high in Illinois because the State isn’t paying its share of education. But I also believe they’re high because of the number of local units of government including school districts. Rauner had the Lt. Governor look into this but what has that produced? I suppose a freeze could reduce the number, but not in a thoughtful, logical way. That’s what passes for “governing” in Illinois. - JS Mill - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 12:10 pm: I was curious about the median home value for Indiana and Illinois so I used the Google. He is what I found…. Per Zwillow- Median home value in Indiana is $120,600 Up 3.3% in the last year. Illinois median value per Zwillow $169,400 Up 5.6% in the last year. The median house value in Illinois is 29% higher and, with everyone leaving, housing values are climbing faster in Illinois. Kind of counter intuitive. /snark Any who, Indiana’s median property tax is 1/3 of Illinois so that is quite a difference. What is the difference between Illinois counties income tax and Indiana? 100% since Illinois counties do not have one. Point being, you can cherry pick a lot of data, but Illinois is not Indiana and vice versa. Our economy is three times the size and expanding, in GDP dollars, faster than Indiana. With all of our problems, I will still stay here that way we will have somebody to shut the lights off./s - The Captain - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 12:14 pm: == I’m sure Rauner has not thought of this. If property taxes go down, how are schools and other things going to be funded? == He’s thought of this, this is by design. He hopes to starve local government, including school districts, to force pay cuts. Remember, the House repeatedly approved a property tax freeze using Rauner’s language in the bill, with one exception. And each time Rauner decried the move as a political stunt. The reason is the one exception, the bill didn’t include Rauner’s language to eliminate collective bargaining on wages for local government. Rauner claims, and the press writes it this way because it’s a convenient shorthand, that his prerequisite for a budget is a property tax freeze. But that’s not true, he’s repeatedly torpedoed a property tax freeze. He wants a property tax freeze if and only if it reduces wages for local government. So his prerequisite isn’t the property tax freeze, it’s the elimination of collective bargaining on wages dressed up as a property tax freeze. It’s pretty repugnant that a guy who made $188 million last year from a blind trust’s overriding political philosophy is that people who work for a living make too much money and that he’s willing to purposely drive the state into the ground to fix that, but here we are. And remember, if the Democrats cave and give him his mandatory win on lowering the wages of people who work for a living he will then allow the double whammy of an income tax increase, which in Illinois is a regressive flat tax. This is why the Democrats who stand up to him have my full, unwavering support and this is why the Democratic position in this political war is as entrenched as it is. - Rich Miller - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 12:48 pm: === He hopes to starve local government=== Last I checked, local governments were sitting on $15 billion in cash reserves. - Thomas Griffin - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 12:52 pm: The property tax freeze is just a way to choke local governments into downsizing, privatization and union-busting because they will be dependent on state funds that will never come. Chicago will be the next Detroit. Time for a clean state budget without turnaround agenda political strings attached. NEIU is canceling furloughs and laying people off now. - Hamlet's Ghost - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 1:49 pm: == Last I checked, local governments were sitting on $15 billion in cash reserves. == According to the State School report Card there are about 2,000,00 public school students in Illinois with an average cost of $12,800 per year. When you Google “2,000,000 x 12,800 in words” the result is twenty-five billion six hundred million ($25.6 billion) $15 billion in reserves covers about 7 months. Then what? - Rich Miller - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 1:52 pm: ===$15 billion in reserves covers about 7 months.=== Um, do you have a problem with basic arithmetic? Nobody’s talking about rescinding all property taxes, which is the only thing that would make your comment relevant. - Liberty - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 2:22 pm: I imagine I 80 is crowded with moving vans for people to get lower valued homes… - X-prof - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 2:33 pm: My take is that Rauner’s call for a property tax freeze is a ploy to distract voters from seeing the big picture in IL’s overall revenue system. He sees it as a vote getter, because people are rightly frustrated with high property taxes. It also distracts voters from seeing the connection between our low and flat income tax and high property taxes. Now here’s what he doesn’t want voters to see. The Rauners’ 2015 IL taxable income was $188 million on which they paid $6.9 million, or 3.67%. Using sources posted by Rich, their total 2015 property tax (for their Winnetka house and their penthouse, condo, and 3 parking spaces at 340 E Randolph) was $154,336, or 0.08% of taxable income. Their overall tax burden was, therefore, 3.75% plus whatever state and local sales tax and excise fees they paid. That information is not available, but we can be reasonably sure that their overall state and local tax rate was well below 4%. The average tax rate in IL, about 10%, is more than 2.5 times higher the Rauners’. This is a nonpartisan issue, it’s a mathematical certainty that investigation of Pritzker or Griffen or anyone else in the top 1% would produce a similar picture. - I think Rauner is most interested in keeping the IL income tax low and flat. As for shrinking local government outside Winnetka, I honestly think he doesn’t give a hoot. Just as he doesn’t care about the harm he is currently doing to social services, universities, the state’s debt, etc. - The next on-the-ball reporter to interview the governor should ask him why he thinks the average taxpayer should be taxed at a rate 2.5 times higher than he and Diane. - Dem candidates should also raise this issue. In particular, it would be very interesting to learn whether JB is willing to take on this issue. The answer would speak volumes as to whether he is really a progressive billionaire. - Precinct Captain - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 3:06 pm: I’m sure Bruce knew nothing about Keith Pekau’s backing by Dan Proft. Nothing at all! - Pot calling kettle - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 3:58 pm: So, is Mayor Keith Pekau saying he cannot be trusted to tax appropriately? If he’s not to be trusted with this important authority, why is he mayor? - JS Mill - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 4:19 pm: =Last I checked, local governments were sitting on $15 billion in cash reserves.= Fair enough, but what was that number two or three years ago? Under Quinn we had to report our reserves once. Everyone knew what that was for, we were going to get shorted and he was trying to gauge how long we could hold out. That $15 billion number represents serious disparity. U-46 had $500 million of that at one time. Only a handful of districts represented about $1 billion in reserves while others were already borrowing to pay current bills. In that time some districts have continued to add to their reserves as well. How much of those reserves are held outside of Cook and the collar counties? The $15 billion tells a story but you have to drill down to really understand it. - Shark Sandwich - Friday, May 26, 17 @ 4:20 pm: Would property tax freezes work both ways? I don’t want to pick on the Borucke’s real hard; but they put themselves out there on this. Their property taxes are all over, up, down. Almost $8k on a $287k house one year, no envy for that bill… But they went down almost 10% in ‘12 and ‘13. A true ‘freeze’ would keep them from maybe getting lower taxes in some of the years, wouldn’t it? Sorry, comments for this post are now closed.