The reality on ‘tax and spend’

Dose of reality — Illinois has not been a welfare state for at least 20 years that I have been keeping track of where it usually falls in the 50 states. Illinois is down at the bottom of states that receive welfare, ranging 45th, 46th, or 47th.

My family has a modest townhome in RED Kansas, personal property tax is about the same as our larger home on almost an acre lot in Naperville/Aurora area and Kansas sales tax runs between 9% and 9.5%. After the rework of the S.A.L.T. (State And Local Tax includes PPT), Trump (2017-2021), only $10,000 could be deducted from your federal taxes, in order to pay for the cuts to the wealthy. The rest was taxed twice, once by the state, the remainder by the federal government.

Most should remember before this, all of your SALT could be deducted on the federal tax return so it was not taxed twice. Recently it was set to $40,000 — for some that is not still 100% (Contact Trump).

I would rather see our hard-earned tax money stay in Illinois, rather than let Trump squander the money in our Treasury, painting everything gold, on the Iran war, on the Big Beautiful Ballroom, destruction of the pool liner we paid for by ordering his cavalcade to drive over it and a slush fund for convicted insurrectionists seen with our own eyes and more unbelievable waste and fraud. Our federal government is $40 trillion in debt: highest in history.

Since Hoover, every economic disaster has happened when Congress and the presidency are held by a majority of Republicans and now teetering on the biggest of Republican disasters. No doubt, taxpayers will have to pay Trump debt.

Jake Simpson

Naperville