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The Only Thing Quinn Has to Offer is Fear Itself 5/19/2009 8:00:00 AM
By Dan Proft
-Don Wade & Roma Morning Show - WLS 890-AM
Click here to listen to an .mp3 of this commentary as heard on this morning's Don Wade & Roma Morning Show on WLS AM-890.
Desperate times call for desperate scare tactics from Governor Pat Quinn.
Yesterday, Quinn argued that if personal and corporate state income taxes are not increased by 50%, as he proposed, Illinois will descend into darkness.
Quinn said, "In the future, cities will become deserts. Roads will become battlefields. And the hope of mankind will appear as a stranger."
Wait, no, I'm sorry, that was the opening line of the trailer for Road Warrior, the 1981 post-apocalyptic thriller. But it is a close approximation of Quinn's unhinged melodrama.
Among the actual examples of his withering sophistry, Quinn said that without his tax increases he would have no choice but to release 6,000 criminals currently incarcerated in Illinois. Quinn would have us believe he is standing at the jailhouse door begging us not to make him open it.
Look, the last thing Quinn wants is marauding biker gangs pillaging peaceful suburban neighborhoods, but, hey, without these massive tax hikes, it is simply out of his hands. Your choice.
What Quinn leaves out of his ghost stories are the truly frightening details. Even as he cries poor, Quinn's proposed budget would increase state spending by 6.5% over last year. I guess his plan is to dig our way out of an $11 billion budget hole by continuing to dig.
Cannibalizing the private sector to finance big government is what cost Illinois 175,000 jobs in calendar year 2008.
Quinn & Co. are very good at conjuring up fictional calamities that will befall Illinois residents to rationalize the status quo when it comes to their taxing and spending.
Quinn & Co. are only interested in measuring the political impacts of their policies. That Illinois is 48th in the nation in economic performance over the past decade is of little matter to them until and unless Illinoisans decide they care to do something about it.
So the question becomes, do you want to do something about it? Well, do you?
 
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