Can you imagine Speaker of the House Mike Madigan at the Argosy Casino in Alton or the Casino Queen in East St. Louis? He’d be the guy at the highest-priced table, losing every hand and signing markers nonstop, always needing a fresh infusion of chips.
He’d have a system, of course, a “foolproof” method of beating the odds that he swears-by no matter how many times he comes up bust.
If he were any other guy, the casino would cut him off. But the pit boss knows Mike’s good for it, that he can afford to keep losing, because it’s not his money he’s betting, and the fools whose money it is don’t have sense enough to say no when Mike asks for more.
Whose money is it? It’s ours. We’re the fools financing Madigan’s long-running losing streak, but the building he’s blowing it in is not a casino. It’s the capitol building in Springfield.
Year in, year out, year after year, Madigan keeps betting our money on programs and policies that are doomed, if not designed to fail. They can’t succeed because they defy the laws of economics.
The money he’s squandering is the money we the citizens of Illinois pay in taxes – with the naïve expectation of something of value in return.
But it’s worse than that, because he’s also squandering money we will never earn. Thanks to him – the income we will forgo, and perhaps never know we might have had, is the result of disastrous policies he persists in pursuing despite proven failure.
Madigan wants us to believe his luck will change if we just spot him more money. It’s not that his ideas are bad or he’s incompetent. He’s undercapitalized, he would argue.
A tax on millionaires he’s proposing would generate the funds he needs – and accelerate the ongoing exodus of productive citizens.
Hey, Mike, do yourself and us a favor. Call 1-800-BETS OFF.