46th District State Senate Candidates: Income Tax

  Our question: The state's income tax hike of 2011 is set to expire. Is that realistic? Is that something Illinois taxpayers can look forward to?

Pat Sullivan:

  This tax increase on our workers is at 67%. He said it was 3 - 5%. It's 67%. A family of four is paying over 700 dollars more in taxes last April. They're not used to this. These high taxes have got to stop. It's running jobs out of the state and businesses can't operate with this high tax.

  We've seen it where these big companies are trying to come and say, "You've got to get your house in fiscal order." High taxes don't do that. Taxing too much, spending too much and borrowing too much. We have to get hold of this; we have to get a hold of it fast for our workers and for us. Our workers need to go back to work.

Dave Koehler:

  That will expire. And what we have to do in the meantime is continue to make the budget cuts that we've made. We've made 2 billion dollars of budget cuts last year, we made another 1.6 billion dollars worth of cuts this year. We do have a plan to pay the back debt.

  Senator John Sullivan from the 47th district has had a bill that talks about bonding of the indebtedness of instead of paying our vendors 1% per month, which is 12% per year - we could bond that at 4% interest and save a lot of money. And, plus pay our vendors and our schools and anyone that we owe money so they can actually make some plans in terms of what their future is going to be.