Democrats in Illinois are proving they are incompetent managers of government

Stephen Moore:

The media has hyper-obsessed over the Kansas tax hike this year and has sold this as a repudiation of "supply side economics." But the real story in the states has been the catastrophic effects of "tax and spend" fiscal policy in Illinois.

Last week Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner continued his three-year standoff with House Speaker for Life Mike Madigan's liberal Democratic machine over a $5 billion annual income-tax hike. The Democrats have dug in their heels.

Anyone who thinks this soak-the-rich scheme will solve Illinois' long-term budget crisis should have their head examined. Illinois already ranks in the top three among the 50 states in state-local tax burden, so if raising taxes were any kind of solution here, the Land of Lincoln would be a Garden of Eden.

Instead the state has been a financial basket case for years.

This is a state that is now $14.5 billion in arrears in paying its bills, whose bonds have been down-graded to near junk bond status, and that is losing its most valuable resource: its businesses and citizens. Small business contractors have to wait 6 months or more to get paid.

Back in 2013 the previous governor, Democrat Pat Quinn followed the advice of economists like Paul Krugman of the New York Times, and raised taxes on the very wealthiest residents of the Land of Lincoln. ‎He argued that the super rich in Illinois could easily afford to pay a bigger share of the tax load and no one would leave.

The more Mr. Quinn raised taxes, the deeper the budget hole got. As a result, whole resort towns in Florida and Arizona have become high-income refugee camps of former affluent residents of Chicagoland.

In 2014 the voters dumped Quinn and his tax and spend economics and opted for businessman Bruce Rauner, a Republican. Rauner tried to fight the empire in Springfield, but was stymied every step of the way. Democrats laughed away his call for a constitutional spending cap, ‎reforms to a pension system that is $200 billion in the red, a property tax cap, and so on. Instead the Democrats mantra sounded a lot like the giant carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors: "feed me."

If there is any state that desparately needs term limits it is this one.
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There is much more.

Illinois should be a case study in demonstrating that liberalism does not work.  That raising taxes to cure a spending problem does not work it only feeds the spending monster.  It is a state that is less dependable than the mob when it comes to running a lotto that actually pays the winner.

Democrats in Connecticut are facing the same problems and they are finding that high taxes do not solve it.