Quinn playing games with numbers

Is Gov. Pat Quinn an exponent of doublespeak, or a math dunce? What is this "1 percent tax increase" he is talking about? Going from a 3 percent state income tax rate to 4 percent is a 33 percent increase in the rate.

Being a politician, Quinn is, of course, being coy and Machiavellian at the same time. Proposing a 33 percent income tax hike sounds draconian, and it is; so he advocates instead a "1 percent surcharge for education." The difference between 3 and 4 is 1, right? Yes, but the "1" represents an amount equal to 1 percent of your adjusted gross income. Quinn wants us to think that he's in favor of a mere 1 percent increase in the tax rate, which, arithmetically, would raise that rate from 3 percent to a whopping 3.03 percent.

But, of course, the governor desires a 4 percent tax rate, not 3.03 percent, so he plays with the language, and he scatters his sound bites among the media, hoping that enough mathematically illiterate constituents in Illinois will be deceived into thinking that his proposal isn't all that unreasonable. What a cynical ploy.

I liked it better when we had a governor who used profanity on tape, and quoted Kipling and the Bible. He at least appealed to my literary taste. This present governor wants to take a populist stance by appealing to folks who think that "50 cents" is written as "0.50 c." People who can't tell $0.50 from a half a penny probably don't know, or care, much about their own money, anyway.

Alexander Lee

Carol Stream