To the editors:
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As one of the two speakers supporting endorsement of Edgar my major point was Edgar’s support for extension of the temporary state income tax surcharge, which Hartigan opposes. Hartigan has campaigned against “fourteen years of tax and spend, tax and spend” despite the fact that Illinois ranks very low among the states in aid to education and very low likewise in the percentage of revenue that comes from state taxes rather than the inequitable locally levied property tax. At the meeting he combined his antitax demagogy with rhetoric about what he would do for early childhood education and other needed human services–all empty rhetoric, of course, given the fact that allowing the surtax to expire would diminish state revenue by half a billion dollars a year.
In the 60s and 70s the Republican right wing criticized the Republican establishment for me-tooing the Democrats. A choice, not an echo, was the right wing’s cry and under Reagan they triumphed and carried out their program, whose fruits we have seen in redistribution of income from the poor to the rich, the wasting of enormous resources on a bloated military, and the leveraged buyout, insider trading and S&L scandals, while the industrial and technological foundations of the economy steadily weakened. As public awareness of the consequences increases, what is needed by the Democrats today is also to offer a choice, not an echo of Republican policies. This year, in New Jersey, newly elected Democratic Governor Jim Florio offered precisely such a choice. New Jersey has enacted a massive increase in state aid to poor school districts, financed by a steep rise in state tax rates on high incomes.
