By Jim Dey
The News-Gazette, Champaign-Urbana, Ill.
(TNS)
The days left on a certain political calendar are dwindling to a precious few.
D-Day is May 3, the last day super-majority legislative Democrats in Springfield can vote to put an amendment eliminating the Illinois Constitution’s flat-tax mandate on the November ballot.
Will they? Maybe. Do they want to do so? Definitely.
It’s been tried before. Gov. J.B. Pritzker could hardly wait to get a progressive income tax amendment on the ballot after his first-term election in 2018.
He persuaded legislators to put the measure on the 2020 ballot and backed it with many millions of dollars of his own money. Then Pritzker watched as his favorite legislative child took a fearsome beating at the polls.
Now that he’s running for a third term this year and, unofficially, for president in 2028, Pritzker is leaving the issue to revenue-hungry legislators to address.
There’s no shortage of influential legislative supporters. House Speaker Chris Welch is on the record saying he’s trying to round up the necessary votes.
But if voters vehemently rejected a progressive tax plan in 2020, why would they vote differently in 2026?
Here’s why: The measure is premised on the idea of applying the tax to only a relative handful of taxpayers. Almost everyone would pay nothing additional in state income tax—at least for now—while those with annual incomes exceeding $1 million would pay a “3 percent surtax.”
A recent study speculated the tax would raise $3.8 billion in its first full year and nearly $5.5 billion annually by 2035.
The idea of raising taxes on “others” is perceived to be a political winner. Indeed, there’s even a bit of doggerel highlighting attitudes of tax-averse citizens: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.”
But the plan is not without risk for ordinary folks. How long would it take some clever lawyer to go to court and argue that, by approving a “millionaire’s tax,” the people of Illinois effectively repealed the Illinois Constitution’s flat-tax mandate?
A progressive income tax allows legislators to impose higher tax rates and on higher levels of income. It’s the kind of blank check that makes legislators drool in anticipation.
They dream of having the ability to fiddle endlessly with tax rates, targeting one group at one level this year and another group at another level next year.
They fear hitting all taxpayers at once, especially those who vote. If they didn’t, they would have approved taxing seniors’ retirement income a long time ago. But nothing scares legislators more than the image of angry septuagenarians waiting in line at a polling place.
That’s one reason Pritzker and legislators have been nickel-and-diming taxpayers for years.
The state’s already-high gas tax is scheduled to increase automatically on July 1.
But taxes on other activities already have jumped—tobacco/vaping (45 percent), sports wagering and telecommunications (8 percent) and Chicago personal property tax leases (15 percent).
For the new fiscal year beginning July 1, the Illinois Policy Institute reports the governor has proposed another $589 million in business tax increases targeting casinos and “social media platforms.”
The good news—for lack of a better description—is that the governor proposed and passed some Illinois-style tax relief.
He eliminated the state’s 1-cent-per-dollar sales tax on groceries that went to local municipalities, not state coffers. Indeed, he’s bragging about the tax cut in his re-election campaign commercials.
But the legislation that eliminated the state-imposed-and-distributed sales tax on groceries also allowed local municipalities to re-impose it. So far, more than 650 municipalities and three counties (Moultrie, Washington and Wabash) have done so.
Photo credit: Ultima_Gaina/iStock
_______
© 2026 The News-Gazette (Champaign, Ill.). Visit www.news-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs
Tags: flat tax, Illinois, Income Taxes, Taxes
