McHenry Times|House candidate Skillicorn states his views on property taxes, term limits and Illinois’ political leadership

 Tax Accountability, the Political Action arm of Taxpayers United of America (TUA), was featured in an article by McHenry Times for their endorsement of Allen Skillicorn.


Since the launch of his campaign, Illinois’ District 66 House candidate Allen Skillicorn has promised he would focus on property taxes and fight to reduce the tax burden on Illinois citizens, as he has successfully done as trustee for the Village of East Dundee.
In a Chicago Tribune questionnaire, Skillicorn, a Republican, maintained his position and said reducing property taxes and worker compensation reform are his highest priorities for state government.
“Property taxes are a crushing burden threatening homeowners and businesses across Illinois. Worker compensation reform — this is crucial to Illinois businesses, jobs, and the vitality of our state economy,” Skillicorn said.
On July 10, 2015, Skillicorn signed the Tax Accountability Taxpayer Protection Pledge promising to “support economic freedom by working to decrease the overall tax burden of taxpayers.”
In response to whether or not he supports legislative term limits and term limits for leadership positions, the marketing director said he does and has set a self-imposed limit should he win.
“Yes, I support term limits. After eight years, it is time to move on from the Illinois House,” Skillicorn said. “Limiting a politician’s span of service helps them focus on what they were sent by the people to do. Endless re-election campaigns and the accumulation of power by too many for too long have led Illinois to its current state of dysfunction.”
House Speaker Michael Madigan is the longest-serving Speaker in Illinois history. He has held the position since 1983, with the exception of two years when Republicans gained control of the House. Madigan has been a member of the House representing District 22 since 1971.
When it comes to key strengths and weaknesses of Chicago and Illinois political leadership, Skillicorn said he believes Gov. Bruce Rauner is putting a commendable amount of effort into rescuing the state.
“Gov. Bruce Rauner is a courageous businessman trying to save the failing state of Illinois,” he said. “Although I’m not wealthy, I made modest contributions to Rauner’s 2014 campaign, put up yard signs, and much more. With my efforts East Dundee was the first municipality in the state to support his Turnaround Agenda. I’m running to help Gov. Rauner in the State House.”
The praise of Illinois’ political leadership ended there.
“In stark contrast, House Speaker Michael Madigan, President John Cullerton, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and many other Democrats have brought Illinois to its current state of crisis, dysfunction and chaos,” Skillicorn said. “How many families have to flee Illinois before they embrace basic reforms to make Illinois competitive? How many innocent peoples’ lives must be destroyed for the narrow, partisan gain of the Illinois Democratic Party? For so many reasons, I’m also running because what Chicago Democrats are doing to our state is wrong.”
Skillicorn was endorsed by the Chicago Tribune earlier this week. Tax Accountability, the Political Action arm of Taxpayers United of America (TUA), has also endorsed the conservative candidate.

No Hope, Nor Change: The Failure of Barack Obama

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CHICAGO—President Barack Obama will address the Illinois General Assembly Wednesday afternoon, not far from the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, where exactly nine years ago the Chicago Democrat first announced his candidacy to become the forty-fourth president.
“This rare speech before the state legislature is an early start to a common presidential practice of reflecting on their administration and constructing a narrative for their legacy – before various political analysts, historians, and the public at large have an opportunity to do so,” said Jared Labell, director of operations for Taxpayers United of America (TUA).
Obama will enter the House chamber to speak to the legislature, just across the rotunda from his former state Senate stomping grounds from 1997 until 2004, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate. All eyes will be on him as he contemplates his past two decades in government, attempting to spin his record and bemoan the civility that is so elusory in twenty-first century American politics.
“President Obama is expected to focus on his personal experiences rather than offering up sweeping policy recommendations, although it is anticipated that he will tout his record of working across party lines and renew his call for an end to gerrymandering in America in general, and particularly in Illinois – gerrymandering being the practice of carving up political districts to capture preferred voters and guarantee election results,” said Labell. “Except Obama’s putting his legacy before the facts, forgetting that his bipartisan efforts are typically disastrous for taxpayers and that his political stardom began with the Chicago Combine, the longtime one party system of rulers and bureaucrats who for decades have helped destroy both the city and Illinois.”
Ryan Lizza’s July 2008 New Yorker article, Making It, argues the latter point at length, but principally relevant, “The partisan redistricting of Illinois may have been the most important event in Obama’s early political life. It immediately gave him the two things he needed to run for the Senate in 2004: money and power. He needed to have several times as much cash as he’d raised for his losing congressional race in 2000, and many of the state’s top donors now lived or worked in his district. More important, the statewide gerrymandering made it likely that Obama’s party would take over the State Senate in 2002, an event that would provide him with a platform from which to craft a legislative record in time for the campaign.”
As to the former point, Obama’s track record in the Illinois General Assembly isn’t something he should revisit during his speech later today, unless he wants to rehash his abysmal voting record and that old cliché about reaching across the aisle. In Obama’s case, however, reaching across the aisle is just a means to shove the government deeper in to the pockets of taxpayers.
“TUA has conducted a biennial Tax Survey of the Illinois General Assembly since 1983, rating legislators’ votes on the basis of their commitment to taxpayers, and Obama’s tenure from ’97-’04 is appallingly bad,” said Labell. “Between the 90th and 93rd Illinois General Assembly terms, then-State Senator Obama scored as high as thirty-four percent and as low as a whopping flat-out zero, indicating that anywhere from two-thirds to one-hundred percent of the time, Obama voted on behalf of the state, the government unions, and the tax-raisers – not the taxpayers who have to toil under the devastating policies of the government elite and Illinois’ political class.”
“If Obama addresses Illinois’ budget impasse today, now in the midst of its eighth month – and without a resolution in sight, he might want to skip over recounting the votes he cast during his first term in office, including: HB313, which allowed county boards to double their pensions and drive up property taxes in Illinois; HB110, an outrageous spending increase that boosted pensions for ninety-seven percent of Illinois’ state employees by fifty-four percent, costing taxpayers roughly $15 million each year; and SB3, which forced taxpayers to subsidize overly generous increases in pensions for government teachers, costing Illinois taxpayers tens of billions of dollars over the next few decades – and we still have a few decades more to go. These are prime examples of Obama’s version of working across the aisle: teaming up with a tax-raising Republican governor, Jim Edgar, with the end result of stiffing taxpayers,” said Labell. “When Obama says bipartisanship, he means the two parties coming together to loot taxpayers, which is of course prevalent in statehouses across the country and in the District of Criminals on the Potomac, where he must feel right at home after the last decade.”
Obama’s record didn’t improve in the U.S. Senate, as he received an annual F-rating in the single and low double digits from the National Taxpayers Union for his tenure from 2005-2007 (2008 being unavailable due to his election to the presidency).
“The public is well aware of the U.S. Senate record of Barack Obama morphing in to his ruinous two terms in the White House: from corporate bailouts at the start of his presidency, to his unprecedented crack down on whistleblowers; from ushering in the unaffordable care act known as Obamacare, to codifying ubiquitous NSA spying in to law; from shredding the Constitution by undermining individual rights and maintaining the shameful U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay; and to the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars squandered to continue and expand George W. Bush’s global military crusade and its brutal interventions in countless nations, including but not limited to Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, and now Syria – it all begins with the Chicago Combine and the wasteland that spawns Illinois’ political elite,” said Labell. “And here Obama is, coming back to Springfield to carve out a nice legacy for himself the day after releasing his record $4.1 trillion budget for fiscal year 2017, which includes $3 trillion in proposed tax hikes.”
“You won’t find this passage noted on the doorway inside the statehouse, nor will it be found in the halls of the U.S. Congress, and it won’t adorn the entrance to the White House, the seat of the American Empire. But in all three cases, it would be fitting to post on the doorframes the inscription described in Dante’s Divine Comedy as he passes through the gates of hell. The engraving reads, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ Obama’s political legacy is the abandonment of hope and change – it’s replete with failure, from Springfield to D.C., and now back again. No matter how pessimistic the outlook seems presently, we must never back down from the defense of freedom. Our work is not yet done and we must maintain our long-term optimism to ensure free markets, peace, and individual liberty will one day mean something again in America,” concluded Labell.

Chicago Teachers Union Threatens Strike: For the children or the tax dollars?

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CHICAGO — Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President, Karen Lewis, and Vice President, Jesse Sharkey, warned CTU members this past Monday to begin saving at least twenty-five percent of their pay “to weather what could be a protracted strike.” This Thursday, November 5, CTU will conduct “an official ‘practice’ strike vote and contract poll in all CPS school buildings,” further setting the stage for an actual strike in the coming months.
Taxpayers United of America’s (TUA) director of operations, Jared Labell, calls CTU’s brazen threat to strike both wildly misdirected and counterproductive for solving the financial fiasco in the Chicago Public Schools, Illinois’ most beleaguered school district.
“Karen Lewis led CTU’s last strike in 2012, declaring it a victory for teachers and students. But even by CTU’s standards, it’s difficult to see how they consider thousands of laid-off teachers and employees, plus dozens of shuttered schools in the interim three years a success, and that’s all prior to the newly proposed cuts by CPS CEO Forrest Claypool, which would take place in early 2016,” said Labell.
CTU has prepared for a possible strike since their contract expired June 30.
Revived talk of a teacher walkout comes mere days after the Chicago City Council approved Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s historic three-quarters of a billion dollars tax increase, which included an unprecedented property tax hike totaling $588 million dollars to fund the Chicago police and firefighter pensions, and pay school construction costs. But even with the historic property tax hike and other fee and tax increases, the infusion of taxpayer dollars will not approach the billions of dollars needed to correct Chicago’s financial footing.
Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune reported that nearly three dozen Chicago high schools are less than half full, which represents an extremely costly problem for CPS in terms of property holdings, maintenance, and administration, but it is simply business as usual for the government unions and their fellow travelers. Every once in a while, however, even they will admit that the system is unsustainable when held to the same standards as found in the free market:

“You have to administer a building, whether a school has 20 kids or 2,000 kids, you got to have a principal. School districts have a lot of fixed costs,” Charles Burbridge, executive director of the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund, said during a recent meeting of the Tribune’s editorial board.

“It’s like, I often say, look at school districts, and essentially they’re like a hotel chain. If you’re not running 80 percent capacity and utilization of your hotels, you’re going out of business,” he said. “Well, CPS is not running 80 percent capacity in its hotel, and it can’t go out of business.”

“The fact is, CTU leadership have been awful stewards of the Chicago Public Schools and their students. The union bosses continue to push for raises and lax performance evaluations in the face of abysmal academic progress for students, ballooning debt, and profligate spending, all the while resisting reforms to their bureaucratic fiefdom and their lavish taxpayer-funded pensions,” said Labell. “And I don’t think CTU will win over many parents of students by approaching the situation as they have. The Chicago Public Schools are basically a government monopoly, top-heavy with exorbitant salaries, gold-plated pensions, and redundant bureaucracy, but they don’t seem to reconcile that with the financial reality average students and families are facing.”
Chicago teachers receive an average salary of about $70,000 annually for nine months of employment, while the per capita income for Chicagoans is less than half of that, and nearly a quarter of the city is below the poverty level.
“My heart goes out to the least affluent families in Chicago, who have little choice in competing educational alternatives. These families are forced to hand over their hard-earned money in the form of property taxes to fund the vast government-education empire housing Chicago’s children like prisoners,” said Labell.
“Perhaps taxpayers should counter CTU’s threat of a teacher strike with a taxpayer strike. If CTU and CPS are not onboard to enact significant structural changes to the heavily indebted and liability-laden district, then Chicagoans should stop enabling them with taxpayer dollars, like one would stop funneling whiskey to a drunk. The question is how badly Chicagoans will feel once the party is over and the well is dry, because either way, the hangover is coming. It’s only a matter of when,” concluded Labell.