Millionaires need nurturing, and luckily for them, they have Illinois to keep them snuggly through the cold winter.
Life for the rich is complicated and challenging. Your Bentley town car is dirty. Who can you assign to take it to the executive car wash? Will we spend June resting in Bimini or a Iceland? So many hard choices.
If you’re one of the 243,350 millionaires in Illinois, you are already deliriously happy with the tax system here. Giddy even.
True, 3,000 millionaires left Chicago last year, according to research firm New World Wealth, but they fled violence and crime, not taxes. Plus, moving to Highland Park is not exactly escaping the Gold Coast. Paris (7,000) and Rome (5,000) lost millionaire fugitives for the same reasons.
But Illinois millionaires can’t bound joyously around Springfield because that would be unseemly, and there’s no use unnerving the legislative field hands or the common folk. Millionaires always act as if they could be victims in a strong-armed robbery at any minute, but that’s playacting. You’ve seen European soccer flopping, I presume?
That’s because no Republican state legislator ever sired in Lincolnland recently will vote to treat them as if they were normal, working lugs. The rich are clearly more important and delicate than everyone else. Especially you.
To make sure survival of the fatcattiest is maintained, the 5 percent of Illinoisans who are millionaires expend a far lower percentage of their spending power on taxes than you do. It’s one of the benefits of richness.
This is the tax system they bought fair and square.
The legislature considered fixing that with two bills last week — one to impose a 3 percent tax on millionaire-only income and the second a plebiscite to allow you to alter the state constitution and allow a graduated income tax.
No dice, said House Republicans. The bills failed because Republicans vote uniformly, shriekingly “no!” as if you’d asked them to support mass genocide. Two Democrats defected, so the bills failed.
In Illinois, the GOP views changing taxes to impose proportional burdens as moral degeneracy.
Raising Illinois taxes on the rich is often called “a stealth tax” by opponents, as if it’s a devious trick or something even darker: the dreaded class warfare.
But there’s no need to seem sneaky. Legislators representing 99.9 percent of voters could do the right thing if they wished.
As for class warfare, that war is over, and the wealthy won.
If you earn the median $47,987 household income in Illinois, you are cooked by taxes.
The 3.75 percent state income tax damaged you far more than the same percent from anyone making $1 million. Fair income tax systems seek balance, not equality.
Here’s the secret to a graduated income tax. If income taxes for the state’s 0.0001 percent richest went up 3 percent, the $8 billion deficit that haunts the state and prevents all rational debate would evaporate.
Not diminish. Not be brought under control. But disappear instantaneously and permanently. Even opponents have checked the math.
Income taxes for everyone outside that 0.0001 percent would be the same or go down.
If you believed the poor-me bombast of rich rhetoric, you’d think these are tough times for the American rich, having spent eight miserable years under the socialist dictatorship of Barack Obama.
But rich people are richer than ever and getting proportionally richer every year. They haven’t taken all of the money yet, but they seem to be trying. And they don’t like it when you suggest they’re greedy, which they are.
According to wealth trackers at Phoenix Marketing International, the nation has 6.1 million millionaires. California has 777,000 millionaires, but Maryland has the highest per capita number with 169,287 Richie Riches. In 20 states, at least 5 percent of the households are millionaire pads.
Mississippi — the least millionaire-infested state in the country — has only 2.9 million residents and 40,955 are millionaires. Everyone else in Mississippi is an indentured servant or playing college football, which is very similar.
A new study from the Institute for Policy Studies think tank says the richest 400 Americans have a combined net worth of $2.34 trillion — equal to that of the bottom 61 percent of the U.S. population, or about 194 million people.
The report said wealth distribution in America no longer resembles a pyramid — it’s like Seattle’s Space Needle.
But the richest people in Illinois insist they’re suffering, though they won’t talk so much about paying a fair share.
Fair? Bad word.
Fair is a term the little people use.
