
The following is a statment from AFSCME on the Civic Federation's new report on the state budget.
The patient, state government, is ailing. Symptoms include chronic
failure to adequately fund basic services or pay bills, forcing harmful
cuts. But this report fails to diagnose the cause, while the bitter
medicine it prescribes offers no cure.
Illinois’s persistent
mismatch between costs and revenues—its structural deficit—results from a
broken and unfair tax system that fails to capture economic growth and
squeezes the middle class while granting rich people lower effective tax
rates and allowing two-thirds of all corporations to pay no corporate
income tax at all.
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