Lawmaker Seeks Ways To Bring State Budget Together
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WBBM) -- One way or another, the budget numbers have to come together in Springfield.
As WBBM Newsradio 780's Dave Dahl reports, the Illinois state budget endgame is coming, with the deadline at the end of May.
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"We're going to hold the line and not spend more than we have, and try to pace out some of the bills; get workers' compensation settled, get these (tax increment financing districts) and enterprise zones figured out, do some other things that are very important to the State of Illinois," said state Rep. John Bradley (D-Marion). "There's a lot of very tough, and some would argue, bad, decisions that are coming up. We live in tough times. We live in financially desperate times, and so the state has to make some policy decisions about long-term consequences."
Bradley says when it comes to budget solutions, everything is on the table. But he says it's not easy, for example, for the state to add sales taxes to services such as haircuts and dry cleaning.
"It takes a lot of political will to do things like that," he said. "Part of the reason that we have revenue problems in the State of Illinois is that we have an unfair system that overtaxes some things and undertaxes other things. For instance, sales tax – and I'm not advocating this, but just as an exercise – when it was developed, 70 percent of the economy was goods, and 30 percent of the economy was services."
Now, Bradley says, that 70-30 split is reversed.
Bradley, chairman of the House Revenue and Finance Committee, says his panel should get some of the credit for helping to stop, for example, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich's proposed gross receipts tax.
