Thursday, January 13, 2011

Illinois Forgets That Competition Is Everywhere

All life is engaged in competition. We compete for mates, for jobs, for prizes and just about everything else. If you're good at something you get more rewards than if you're not. We compete at all levels - as individuals, as teams, as cities, as states and as nations.

Illinois is in deep fiscal trouble. They've spent and promised way more than they can deliver*. They recently decided to solve their problems with massive tax increases. How's that going to work out? Well, here's the governor of Wisconsin reacting to the Illinois tax hike.


Wisconsin is focused on wealth creation while Illinois is focused on wealth distribution. Those who create wealth will want to move to Wisconsin while those who expect it to be distributed to them will move to Illinois.

Illinois is about to find out that wealth creation is more important than they think.

* - This is probably the fault of Sarah Palin and right wing hate speech.

6 comments:

Jeff Burton said...

For what it's worth, Walker is flapping his gums. Wisconsin has a worse business climate than Illinois. Though maybe Quinn will fix that.

K T Cat said...

Jeff, a friend and work said the same thing. In any case, it's certainly a data point in the Great American Excperiment. All tax increases and no spending cuts. Let's see how well it works ...

Kelly the little black dog said...

I've told by folks from the great rust belt that even with the tax increase, the taxes in Illinois will still be lower than the surrounding states.

And actually its Newt's turn to be blamed. You have to keep up with the rotation.

Mostly Nothing said...

When I moved from NY to Chicago, I did it in the middle of the year, early to mid July. This would have been 1991, I think.

I earned roughly the same amount in both states. Within a 1000.

My NY taxes were nearly 2 times Illinois.

Now, living near the other border of Wisonsin, I've never heard them accused of having low taxes. The Illinois tax increase, probably just makes Wisconsin not look so bad. Wisconsin is typically the highest around. And that's saying something being next to Minnesota.

I hope it doesn't drive too much business away. My brother owns a small business in Lake county, engineering work, plumbing, HVAC, etc consulting.

He also lives in Wisconsin.

K T Cat said...

And actually its Newt's turn to be blamed. You have to keep up with the rotation.

LOL!

Incidentally, I got to meet Mr. Newt once and have about an hour or two conversation with him once. He was very impressive.

K T Cat said...

Mostly, I've heard the same thing about WI. I was just posting this to note how the surrounding states were going to pounce. While WI has some issues, I don't think IN has the same ones.