Frerichs, who has since walked back his statement, had been scheduled to address his “misleading” comments in a press conference Tuesday, in which he aimed to “reassure senior citizens that the proposal will not tax retirement income.” That appearance was abruptly canceled just 10 minutes before it was set to begin. […]
Speculation swirled over why Frerichs suddenly canceled his Tuesday appearance, but it appears Pritzker may have played a role.
“Earlier today, Gov. Pritzker put the muzzle on Treasurer Frerichs who was minutes away from telling the people of Illinois the truth: Pritzker has a plan to tax retirement income in Illinois and needs the constitutional amendment to get it done” Illinois Republican Party Chairman Tim Schneider said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not deny Pritzker’s involvement in the decision.
* So, I asked the governor’s office for a response. Here’s Jordan Abudayyeh…
The Governor speaks regularly to allies and stakeholders about policy. The decision on his media availability is ultimately up to the Treasurer.
Heh.
*** UPDATE *** Quentin Fulks told WCIA’s Mark Maxwell the reality about the prospects for a tax on retirement income. “It’s political suicide,” Fulks said (correctly, I would add). “It’s an extremely unpopular topic in Illinois”…
* Background is here if you need it. Republican members of the Special Investigating Committee respond to the postponement of hearings until after the election…
“Special treatment is being given to Speaker Madigan,” [Rep. Tom Demmer] said. “It deprives the people of Illinois and fellow members from learning what conduct the speaker may have engaged in.”
“Chairman Welch’s decision is an utter insult to the people of Illinois,” Mazzochi said. “Welch said he would run a professional investigation. This is how a professional politician covers up the truth. The only thing that seems to matter is protecting Mike Madigan.”
“I thought Chris Welch was a man of integrity,” Wehrli said. “Today Chris Welch decided integrity doesn’t matter. We are being stonewalled. We are being lied to protect one man.”
“Chairman Welch’s decision is an utter insult to the people of Illinois who want and deserve the truth. Chairman Welch has now become Chairman Squelch,” said Rep. Deanne Mazzochi (R-Elmhurst).
Mazzochi, one of three Republicans serving on the investigating committee, said it’s clear that Welch is only interested in protecting Madigan.
“Chris Welch said that he was going to run a professional investigation. This is not how a professional runs an investigation. This is how a political professional covers up the truth and crushes an investigation,” she said. “Chris Welch is a coward. He does not have the resolve to have Mike Madigan come before our committee, and actually answer those questions, blocking the right of voters to know.”
State Rep. Deanne Mazzochi, R-Elmhurst, is also on the committee and said delaying the next hearing to after the election is stonewalling and a disservice to voters.
“We have a Speaker of the House mentioned 72 times is a deferred prosecution agreement,” Mazzochi said. “We are right before an election and Chris Welch doesn’t want to give voters that transparency. That’s despicable.”
“The only thing apparently that matters is protecting Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan,” Mazzochi said. “That’s what matters to Chris Welch: protecting his patronage, protecting his political power, protecting his privilege. … This is stonewalling. This is ostrich-in-the-sand decision-making.”
As the late Rep. Zeke Giorgi used to say about the House: “Best show in Illinois.”
*** UPDATE *** Stay tuned…
MEDIA ADVISORY: Illinois House Republican Leader Jim Durkin Says Time’s Up for Democrats: Demand Answers from Madigan or Call for His Resignation
WHO: Illinois House Republican Leader Jim Durkin (R-Western Springs)
WHAT: Leader Durkin says time’s up for Democrats, either demand answers in ComEd’s nine-year bribery scheme or demand Madigan’s resignation.
Local health leaders are encouraging the public to take the same actions that help prevent the spread of COVID-19 — wearing a face mask, washing hands frequently and maintaining social distance — to also prevent spread of the flu.
The upcoming Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and students back from school will mean more family gatherings and the opportunity for both to spread, if people let their guards down.
That’s why, those leaders say, it is important to get a flu vaccine as the flu season starts in earnest.
Flu vaccines are plentiful, said Gail O’Neill, director of the Sangamon County Department of Public Health.
* The Question: Did you get your flu shot yet? Take the poll and then explain your answer in comments, please…
It’s not such a stretch to link the current attempt to upend the state’s most powerful politician to a teenage gabfest back in 1989.
That’s when a few girlfriends, sitting on a couch in Midlothian, began talking about what they wanted to do with this next phase of their lives after graduation.
That’s also when then 18-year-old Wheaton High School grad Stephanie Kifowit, “a little bored” working at Osco and taking some classes at College of DuPage, declared her desire for some “adventure and excitement.” So she pulled out a phone book, called a Harvey recruiting station, and picked the U.S. Marine Corps over the Air Force or Army because she figured “go big or go home.”
When I spoke with state Rep. Kifowit on Friday, the 84th District Democrat who represents portions of Aurora, Naperville, Oswego and Montgomery, had a day earlier announced she was challenging Michael Madigan’s post as Speaker of the House. And she quickly pointed to her stint in the U.S. Marines with giving her the moxie to take on the undisputed Boss Man of Illinois politics and do so in such way that could define her own political destiny.
We’ve been quick to heap praise on Democratic lawmakers who openly have taken the politically courageous stand of calling for Mike Madigan to give up his positions as House speaker and head of the Illinois Democratic Party. But the announcement by Oswego Democratic state Rep. Stephanie Kifowit deserves special acknowledgment of its own. For, Kifowit brings something to a decision about leadership in the House that the lower chamber hasn’t seen in almost anyone’s memory.
Republican candidates for the Illinois House are putting pressure on their Democratic opponents to announce whether they will support Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who’s implicated but not charged in a bribery scheme unearthed by federal prosecutors. […]
And though she’s taken nearly $800,000 from political funds Madigan controls, last week, state Rep. Stephanie Kifowit, D-Oswego, who’s running unopposed for her House seat, said she can’t support the speaker and will challenge him for the position when the new Legislature is seated in January.
“The people of Illinois are tired of putting up with corruption or scandal for a long time,” Kifowit said.
* Related…
* State Rep. Stephanie Kifowit on why she’s challenging Mike Madigan for Illinois House Speaker: ‘We need to have a much higher standard of principle and ethics for those individuals in very high leadership positions in the state’
The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) today reported 2,630 new confirmed cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Illinois, including 42 additional confirmed deaths.
• Bureau County: 1 female 40s
• Champaign County: 1 female 80s
• Christian County: 1 female 70s, 2 males 80s, 1 female 90s
• Clinton County: 1 female 80s
• Coles County: 1 female 80s
• Cook County: 1 male 60s, 1 female 80s, 1 male 80s, 2 males 90s
• DuPage County: 1 male 70s, 1 female 80s, 1 male 80s, 1 female 90s, 1 male 90s
• Franklin County: 1 male 90s
• Kane County: 1 female 70s
• Kankakee County: 1 male 70s
• Madison County: 1 female 90s
• Marion County: 1 male 70s, 1 male 80s
• Perry County: 1 female 60s
• Randolph County: 1 male 70s
• Rock Island County: 1 male 70s
• Saline County: 1 female 80s
• Sangamon County: 1 male 90s
• Shelby County: 1 female 70s, 1 female 80s
• St. Clair County: 1 female 80s, 1 female 90s
• Tazewell County: 1 female 80s, 1 male 80s
• Wabash County: 1 male 70s
• Will County: 1 female 50s, 1 female 60s, 1 female 70s, 2 females 90s
• Williamson County: 1 female 90s
Currently, IDPH is reporting a total of 307,641 cases, including 8,878 deaths, in 102 counties in Illinois. The age of cases ranges from younger than one to older than 100 years. The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total test from September 30 – October 6 is 3.5%. Within the past 24 hours, laboratories have reported 58,820 specimens for a total of 6,033,289. As of last night, 1,679 people in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 372 patients were in the ICU and 165 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.
Following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, IDPH is now reporting separately both confirmed and probable cases and deaths on its website. Reporting probable cases will help show the potential burden of COVID-19 illness and efficacy of population-based non-pharmaceutical interventions. IDPH will update these data once a week.
*All data are provisional and will change. In order to rapidly report COVID-19 information to the public, data are being reported in real-time. Information is constantly being entered into an electronic system and the number of cases and deaths can change as additional information is gathered. For health questions about COVID-19, call the hotline at 1-800-889-3931 or email dph.sick@illinois.gov.
The nonpartisan Tax Foundation has released an updated report on Governor J.B. Pritzker’s (D) proposal to permit a graduated-rate income tax in Illinois, which would take effect if voters approve a constitutional amendment on November 3.
If passed, Illinois would have some of the highest individual and corporate income taxes in the country and one of the least competitive overall tax codes, causing the state to decline from 36th to 47th on the State Business Tax Climate Index.
Other findings from the report include:
• Combined corporate income would be taxed at 10.49 percent, the second-highest rate in the nation
• Pass-through business income would be taxed at a top rate of 9.49 percent, the sixth-highest rate in the nation
• The neighboring states of Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, and Missouri have all cut income taxes in recent years, while Illinois may be headed in the opposite direction
• The proposal diverges sharply from ideal—or even typical—income tax structure by:
o Omitting inflation indexing (resulting in “bracket creep”)
o Creating a marriage penalty
o Imposing a recapture provision which subjects the entirety of a taxpayer’s income to the top marginal rate once they reach that bracket
• Should voters permit a graduated-rate income tax, there’s reason to believe that rates may climb even higher and that more taxpayers would be subjected to higher rates
“Were Pritzker’s proposal adopted,” writes Senior Policy Analyst Jared Walczak, “Illinois would trail its peers in just about every aspect of its tax code. If businesses and individuals are leaving the state now, these policies can only make the problem worse.”
It’s not surprising that a group that’s lauded Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts is against a policy that will fix our broken and unfair tax system that forces hardworking families and struggling small businesses to pay the same tax rate as millionaires and billionaires. It means at least 97% of Illinoisans will receive a tax cut, including more than 95% of small businesses, while generating billions of dollars in additional revenue that can go toward funding our education system and lessening the property tax burden. Currently, thousands of lower-income minority families are fleeing Illinois each year in search of better opportunity, and by passing the Fair Tax we can create a state where they, and all of our families, can thrive.
Illinois does not currently tax retirement income, but there is nothing in the constitution preventing legislators from passing a law to start doing so.
“The myths and lies that are out there about that are obvious of where they’re coming from which are individuals who don’t want to pay their fair share,” [AARP Illinois State Director Bob Gallo] said. “The state could have raised or taxed retirement income all along and they have floated that trial balloon in the past and AARP stopped it in its tracks.”
Gallo said AARP will do the same should anyone instigate discussions about taxing retirement.
He said a graduated tax will help seniors, by helping to get the state on sounder fiscal footing after in recent years having social services that support vulnerable populations get gutted for lack of funding.
Don Todd, president of the Illinois Alliance for Retried Americans said opponents have “spread lies about the fair tax.” He cited an ad featuring a woman who says she is a grandmother who says she won’t be able to afford to live in Illinois if the amendment passes because it will tax her retirement.
Opposition groups have cited comments made by Treasurer Mike Frerichs last summer to justify their ads suggesting retirement income could be taxed if the amendment is approved. Frerichs told a chamber of commerce that a graduated tax would allow taxation of very high pension incomes. However, he has emphasized he does not support taxing retirement income and Pritzker also opposes it.
Carmen Batances of Chicago, a member of Jane Addams Seniors in Action, said the flat tax “disproportionately harms low income communities of color in Illinois.”
“Many of our children are overtaxed with the flat tax,” she said. “I demand the false advertisements made to scare seniors be taken down immediately.”
…Adding… The entire @liz_uihlein account has been deleted. This could be a fake. Taking down the screen shot, etc. for now.
…Adding… Institute of Government and Public Affairs press release…
A new report from IGPA, titled How Often Do Graduated and Flat Rate States Change Their Tax Rates?, looks at what other states have done in the recent past.
“The debate over Illinois’ graduated tax proposal made me wonder, do other states change their personal income tax rates frequently?” said report author and IGPA Senior Scholar David Merriman. “It turns out the answer is no, and that goes for states with graduated-rate structures and flat-rate structures. Changes to personal income tax rates just aren’t that common.”
The report considers the personal income tax systems of all U.S. states and the District of Columbia from 2002 through 2019. Merriman, who also chairs IGPA’s Working Group on the Fiscal Health of Illinois, looked at 153 cases of annual tax rate dynamics in states with flat rates taxes and 592 cases of tax rate dynamics in states with graduated rate taxes.
In each year, Merriman examined whether any state tax rate changed. Out of 153 total cases, there were tax rate changes in 27 cases, or 17.76%, in states with a flat-rate tax. In graduated-rate states, out of 592 total cases, there were tax rate changes in 94 cases, or 15.85%. When rate changes were made, rate cuts were much more common than rate increases in both flat- and graduated-rate systems.
*** UPDATE 1 *** The governor’s campaign folks are going with it…
In a since deleted tweet, Uline President Liz Uihlein announced her opposition to the Fair Tax, calling it a “handout” to her employees. These are the same employees she forced to come into work in a call center at the peak of the Coronavirus pandemic back in March. In the tweet, she expresses concern about having to “subsidize” her employees’ taxes, though her company received up to $18.6 million from the taxpayers of Wisconsin when it moved its facilities there in 2010. The Uihlein family is estimated to be worth $4 billion.
Uihlein’s husband, Richard Uihlein, has donated $100,000 to an organization fighting against the Fair Tax.
This tweet by Uihlein echoes a comment made by another opponent of the Fair Tax a few months ago, when Cindy Neal despicably called low income Illinoisans “takers” and high-income earners “makers” in an interview with WCIA’s Mark Maxwell.
“Opponents of the Fair Tax can try to hide behind millions of dollars in disingenuous ads and false rhetoric, but the truth will always come out,” said Quentin Fulks, Chairman of Vote Yes For Fairness. “Billionaires like Liz Uihlein and Ken Griffin don’t care about our middle and lower-income families. They only care about protecting their bottom line, which is why they’re fighting to stop the Fair Tax, which would make them finally pay their fair share and give a tax cut to 97% of Illinoisans. Time and again, opponents of the Fair Tax have made clear they’re only in it for themselves, and Vote Yes For Fairness is committed to making sure they don’t get away with their deceptive tactics.”
The alleged tweet…
*** UPDATE 2 *** As I suspected…
Rich,
I am writing to you to confirm that the alleged Liz Uihlein tweet that was the subject of your coverage yesterday was a fake account, and that Liz Uihlein has never had a twitter account. After being reported, the fake account has been removed by Twitter for impersonation. We respectfully request that you please remove this coverage of this issue or update it to indicate it was a fake account in no way related to Liz Uihlein.
On behalf of the Christain County Health Department:
At the recent Greater Taylorville Chamber of Commerce Chilifest, an employee of the Capital City Cornhole company has tested positive for COVID-19. Capital City Cornhole organized and conducted the three-day bag tournaments. They held four tournaments total throughout the weekend (Oct 2-4, 2020) to include two at Chilifest, one at the American Legion, and one at Mity’s Pub. There were two hundred and thirty participants registered total at these events and numerous observers in attendance. Anyone in attendance at this event that mingled amongst the participants/employees are at risk for exposure. […]
The full extent of this mass exposure at such a large gathering is not possible to fully contact trace, so we encourage all participants/observers that may have been exposed to players/employees to self-monitor for symptoms. This event was not condoned by Christian County Public Health who had met with and advised officials.
The Illinois Republican Party called on Governor JB Pritzker to demand State Rep. Chris Welch resign from the committee investigating House Speaker Michael Madigan.
In addition to his conflict of interest working with Madigan to place family members in state jobs, Republican members of the committee yesterday revealed that Welch had failed to publicly disclose that his former law firm was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by ComEd while Welch was a partner.
“Welch should have disclosed these obvious conflicts of interest before accepting Madigan’s appointment as chair of this investigation,” ILGOP spokesperson Joe Hackler said. “We call on Governor Pritzker to demand Welch’s resignation from the committee immediately.”
I asked how the workings of a state legislative committee is a governor’s (any governor’s) business.
* The response…
What is the Governor’s business is a functioning state government, free from corruption and obvious conflicts of interest. He has the ability - the duty even - to push the people in the party that he leads to do the right thing. For months, the Governor has sat on his hands feebly begging via the press for Madigan to answer questions and then doing absolutely nothing to make it happen. At some point, one would think Madigan not providing the Governor (or any of us) any answers would make him change his tune. It hasn’t. Have you asked the Governor’s team whether he thinks Madigan should be issued a subpoena?
Pretty sure I have asked about this, but I also know that anyone who has ever launched a frontal attack on Madigan has only succeeded in uniting Madigan’s members against him or her. Also, while Bruce Rauner ran (twice) on the promise of confronting Madigan, Pritzker made no such promise to voters. Elections, as they say, have consequences.
Politics being politics, it’s totally fair to point out that the governor isn’t doing what you want him to do. Reality being reality, though, I wouldn’t expect the governor to be taking orders from the ILGOP anytime soon.
Jilted applicants for the next round of pot shop licenses called on Cook County leaders Tuesday to probe former pot regulator and current Commissioner Bridget Degnen’s potential ties to the cannabis industry.
Rickey Hendon, a former Democratic state senator and dispensary applicant, said officials should hold a hearing to question whether Degnen is connected to any group that applied or became a finalist for the 75 upcoming dispensary licenses. Degnen, the former deputy director of medical cannabis at the state agency that issues dispensary licenses, pitched herself as an expert last year as she offered paid application help to two individuals tied to a group seeking dispensary licenses, the Sun-Times has learned.
Degnen, who didn’t respond to requests for comment Tuesday, has refused to answer any questions about her alleged work in the industry.
Companies and individuals involved in the weed business have flooded her campaign coffers with at least $19,200 in donations, according to a Sun-Times analysis.
There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. […]
This highly skewed, imbalanced distribution means that an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries. […]
[Muge Cevik, a clinical lecturer in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St. Andrews] identifies “prolonged contact, poor ventilation, [a] highly infectious person, [and] crowding” as the key elements for a super-spreader event. Super-spreading can also occur indoors beyond the six-feet guideline, because SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, can travel through the air and accumulate, especially if ventilation is poor. … But we don’t need to know all the sufficient factors that go into a super-spreading event to avoid what seems to be a necessary condition most of the time: many people, especially in a poorly ventilated indoor setting, and especially not wearing masks. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, told me, given the huge numbers associated with these clusters, targeting them would be very effective in getting our transmission numbers down. […]
Take Sweden, an alleged example of the great success or the terrible failure of herd immunity without lockdowns, depending on whom you ask. In reality, although Sweden joins many other countries in failing to protect elderly populations in congregate-living facilities, its measures that target super-spreading have been stricter than many other European countries. Although it did not have a complete lockdown, as Kucharski pointed out to me, Sweden imposed a 50-person limit on indoor gatherings in March, and did not remove the cap even as many other European countries eased such restrictions after beating back the first wave. […]
Once a country has too many outbreaks, it’s almost as if the pandemic switches into “flu mode,” as Scarpino put it, meaning high, sustained levels of community spread even though a majority of infected people may not be transmitting onward.
…Japan focused on the overdispersion impact from early on, likens his country’s approach to looking at a forest and trying to find the clusters, not the trees. Meanwhile, he believes, the Western world was getting distracted by the trees, and got lost among them. To fight a super-spreading disease effectively, policy makers need to figure out why super-spreading happens, and they need to understand how it affects everything, including our contact-tracing methods and our testing regimes. […]
Right now, many states and nations engage in what is called forward or prospective contact tracing. Once an infected person is identified, we try to find out with whom they interacted afterward so that we can warn, test, isolate, and quarantine these potential exposures. But that’s not the only way to trace contacts. And, because of overdispersion, it’s not necessarily where the most bang for the buck lies. Instead, in many cases, we should try to work backwards to see who first infected the subject.
Because of overdispersion, most people will have been infected by someone who also infected other people, because only a small percentage of people infect many at a time, whereas most infect zero or maybe one person. As Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and the author of the book The Rules of Contagion, explained to me, if we can use retrospective contact tracing to find the person who infected our patient, and then trace the forward contacts of the infecting person, we are generally going to find a lot more cases compared with forward-tracing contacts of the infected patient, which will merely identify potential exposures, many of which will not happen anyway, because most transmission chains die out on their own. […]
Even in an overdispersed pandemic, it’s not pointless to do forward tracing to be able to warn and test people, if there are extra resources and testing capacity. But it doesn’t make sense to do forward tracing while not devoting enough resources to backward tracing and finding clusters, which cause so much damage.
In an overdispersed regime, identifying transmission events (someone infected someone else) is more important than identifying infected individuals. Consider an infected person and their 20 forward contacts—people they met since they got infected. Let’s say we test 10 of them with a cheap, rapid test and get our results back in an hour or two. This isn’t a great way to determine exactly who is sick out of that 10, because our test will miss some positives, but that’s fine for our purposes. If everyone is negative, we can act as if nobody is infected, because the test is pretty good at finding negatives. However, the moment we find a few transmissions, we know we may have a super-spreader event, and we can tell all 20 people to assume they are positive and to self-isolate—if there are one or two transmissions, there are likely more, exactly because of the clustering behavior. Depending on age and other factors, we can test those people individually using PCR tests, which can pinpoint who is infected, or ask them all to wait it out. […]
Scarpino told me that overdispersion also enhances the utility of other aggregate methods, such as wastewater testing, especially in congregate settings like dorms or nursing homes, allowing us to detect clusters without testing everyone. Wastewater testing also has low sensitivity; it may miss positives if too few people are infected, but that’s fine for population-screening purposes. If the wastewater testing is signaling that there are likely no infections, we do not need to test everyone to find every last potential case. However, the moment we see signs of a cluster, we can rapidly isolate everyone, again while awaiting further individualized testing via PCR tests, depending on the situation.
The White House, as it turns out, misused rapid testing on individuals. Because the tests miss so many positive results, they should only be used to catch outbreaks among groups of people, who can then be individually tested.
* So, to sum up: Avoid indoor areas, keep the occupancy restrictions in place, stress ventilation improvements, concentrate on finding the sources of outbreaks and use rapid and aggregate tests to quickly locate developing problems and then use PCR tests to pinpoint individual infections. But don’t take my word for it, go read the whole thing. There is also some eye-opening info about schools.
Johnny Nash, an American reggae and pop music singer-songwriter, best known in the US for the 1972 hit, “I Can See Clearly Now,” died Tuesday at his home, his son confirmed to CBS Los Angeles. He was 80.
Born in Houston, Nash started singing as a child at Progressive New Hope Baptist Church. He made his major label debut in 1957 with the single “A Teenager Sings the Blues.”
His first chart hit was a cover of Doris Day’s “A Very Special Love,” in early 1958, but his claim to fame was the 1972 reggae-influenced single “I Can See Clearly Now.” The single sold over one million copies, reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Nov. 4, 1972 and remained atop the chart for four weeks.
* His song got a whole lot of people through a whole lot of pain, including me…
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for
Please keep your discussion local and be kind to each other. Thanks.
