| Today, the Chicago Tribune endorsed Governor Rauner, highlighting how critical this election is to the future of Illinois. They remark on Pritzker’s inability to stand up to Democrats, particularly their tax-and-spend mentality contributing to the exodus of families leaving the state. Take a look at the Chicago Tribune’s endorsement of Governor Rauner: |
| Combative campaigns, like summer romances, tend to be fun and have no lasting consequence. But after this election, one of these men — Republican Rauner or Democrat Pritzker — likely will govern with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature until the first days of 2023. If Pritzker wins, he’ll empower the same Democratic leaders who have heaped enormous benefits on public employee unions and other pet constituencies; in return the politicians reap the campaign money and muscle that keeps them in control. Owing to the Democrats’ chronic overpromising, overspending, overborrowing and overtaxing, Illinois citizens, their children and grandchildren face vast public debts they may be unable to repay. Because this crisis threatens ever-higher taxation, the Illinois Exodus intensifies: Those of us still here see our state lose its employers, its middle-class families, its young people. As the expatriates move to growing and prosperous states, we lose their ambition, their desire for opportunity and, yes, their taxable income. We lose the once-robust future of Illinois. Pritzker sees this destiny. He instead wants you to look backward at the past four years, including a nasty quest for a budget. You don’t, though, hear Pritzker criticize Democratic leaders for sending Rauner budgets that would have spent billions of dollars more than Springfield collected. Rauner, a stubborn guy, refused to play the Democrats’ game. And over the next four years, someone had better keep refusing these Democratic legislative leaders. Because in Pritzker they see a malleable rookie politician who’ll give them what they haven’t reliably had: a governor’s signatures on tax increases, spending increases, debt increases. Pritzker, eager to oblige, wants more tax increases, no matter the damage to the private-sector economy. As if what Illinois needs most is more reasons for its employers and workers and young people to leave. Pritzker’s refusal for well more than a year to divulge his income tax plans ought to stop every voter cold. If his “scheme to defraud” fellow taxpayers by deactivating toilets in a mansion — as Cook County’s inspector general alleges — is a Pritzker sin of commission, stonewalling voters on how much more he wants to skim their hard-earned income is a similarly grave sin of omission. Amending the state constitution to permit a progressive income tax would open the way to sky-high tax rates. Why won’t Pritzker be transparent and honest with all of us? How many more billions of dollars does he want to collect, and from whom? Because there just aren’t enough wealthy Illinoisans whose higher taxes could fix this state’s finances. Who else gets gouged? So if you plan to vote for Pritzker because he isn’t Rauner, imagine a governor who won’t even raise a finger against his fellow Democrats. Ask yourself whether another dose of unchecked rule by Democratic leaders will restore Illinois to the prosperity and opportunity for which it once was famed. Then ask whether a second-term Rauner would do exactly what he has tried to do in his first term: deprive those Democratic leaders of their wretched excesses in spending and taxing. That answer to that is yes, as the Democrats know. They loathe Rauner. He often stalemates them. Armed only with a veto pen and a bully pulpit, he blocks their exclusive dominion over lawmaking. Which is precisely why we endorse Bruce Rauner, and urge you to re-elect him governor of Illinois. ### |
