West Cook News

Former Republican Congressional candidate Dr. Jeff Leef argues Gov. J.B. Pritzker strikes him as the least credible person imaginable to be charged with selling his progressive tax proposal.

“The governor routinely bloviates about how a progressive income tax is fair, but given the governor’s rank hypocrisy regarding taxation, one is hard-pressed to believe he really has our best interest uppermost in his heart and mind,” Leef told Chicago City Wire. “To be plain about it, the governor is a hypocrite when it comes to taxation.”

Leef points to a recent Illinois Policy Institute (IPI) analysis of Pritzker’s progressive tax proposal as yet another example of how off base he can be.

If the proposal Pritzker is still selling as just a tax on the rich ever sees the light of day, the state would lose the equivalent of all the 45,000 jobs it gained in 2019, according to IPI. In all, IPI projects that some 56,399 jobs would be lost. On a per-capita basis adjusted to take into account the number of employed residents, Cook County would lose over 43,000 jobs. While that represents the bulk of the jobs lost across the entire state, the number is likely many more given there is more industry concentrated in the city than in other areas of the state.

“This alleged friend of Illinois taxpayers is the man who in 2007 bought a $3.7 million Astor Street mansion in Chicago and then had five toilets removed from it so that the Cook County tax assessor could declare it uninhabitable and thus reduce the property’s assessed value from $6.3 million to $1.1 million,” Leef added of the governor. “Pritzker is a billionaire leftist dilettante whose only qualification for becoming governor was his inability to have a responsible role within the Pritzker Family’s vast business holdings.”

Later this year, voters are set to get their say when they cast ballots on whether the state constitution should be amended to allow lawmakers the authority to enact a progressive tax system to replace the current flat tax.

Leef argues the decision should be an easy one.

“A progressive income tax does nothing to improve the lives of those it taxes,” he said. “In fact, it burdens them with a stagnate and dying economy. California and New York raised their progressive taxes and…their economies stalled as anyone who could afford to do fled to more tax-friendly climes."