Pritzker Continues to Push Democrats for Tax Hikes
Governor JB Pritzker before delivering his State of the State and Budget Address in February. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)
NOTE: This story was originally posted for subscribers only. To receive subscriber-only newsletters and content, click here.
After Governor JB Pritzker’s chief budget negotiator sent agency heads a memo last week preparing them to outline $800 million in cuts, Pritzker Monday tried to downplay any dissention among Democrats.
Rep. Jay Hoffman (D-Swansea) told Capitol News Illinois last week there was “significant enough” opposition to Pritzker’s roughly $1 billion in tax increases in a new state budget, including an increase in the sports betting tax, increasing the corporate net operating loss deduction cap from $100,000 to $500,000, and by reducing the 1.75% retailer's tax discount, which has been in place for decades.
At an unrelated event Monday, Pritzker said there aren’t specific factions of Democrats that are opposed to his proposal.
“I don’t think it’s some faction or another,” he said. “There were just, there were some some talk in caucus meetings that were occurring in the House or the Senate, in which people had raised concerns or objections, some of which is misinformation or they don’t have the right information about what we’re doing.”
Pritzker included the tax increases in his $53 billion budget proposal. Some Democrats accused the administration of “saber rattling” and trying to “scare” Democrats to vote for the tax hike. But Pritzker denied there were motivations behind the memo to agency heads.
“We realized that we may not be able to get to all of the members or explain it properly to all of them and just wanted to make sure that they understood our leaders of our agencies needed to understand, that if those new revenues don’t come through that we’ll probably be hearing from the legislature about cuts that they want to make,” Pritzker said. “And so we wanted to put everybody on notice. That’s the real purpose of that memo.”
Some Democrats we spoke to last week, even after the memo was released, were confident there would be no serious hang-ups in making a budget deal.