Remove your toilets if you want property tax relief

Our billionaire Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, admits he can’t run the state, but he wants your vote anyway.

He has spent $100 million of his own money on his campaigns. That is chump change for a guy like Rauner.

His multi-billionaire Democratic opponent, J.B. Pritzker, has invested more than $100 million of his own money on his campaign for governor. That would also appear to be meaningless money, based on Pritzker’s estimated $4 billion personal fortune.

Yet, we know toilets were taken out of a mansion Pritzker bought in an effort to have the building declared uninhabitable. According to a Cook County inspector general’s report, that little move saved him more than $300,000 in property taxes over three years.

Pritzker, who claims to be a reformer, blames the property tax system for his toilet exodus, inferring that legal loopholes for the wealthy are so large they are simply irresistible.

“I’ve been saying all along there are flaws in the property tax system,” Pritzker said. “We followed the rules.”

Those rules were set up by powerful politicians in Illinois, both Republicans and Democrats, to help their wealthy friends while placing the burden of public education funding on the backs of working-class families.

Property taxes are the primary method of funding public schools in Illinois. That’s because this state, unlike every other state in the nation, has failed to do its fair share to finance education.

For decades politicians blamed local school boards for this and teachers for asking for pay raises, health insurance and pensions.

When the state failed to adequately fund the teacher pension system and even borrowed money from it, many politicians once again blamed the teachers, or remained silent as others did their dirty work for them.

In the meantime, many of these same politicians, a lot of them Democrats, created a property tax system so complicated, so full of legal loopholes, that lawyers made fortunes appealing property tax assessments on behalf of businesses and wealthy individuals.

To make sure no one messed with this mess of a system, the Democrats in Cook County installed their party leader as assessor to enforce a system that was ethically and morally corrupt.

School children suffered. People struggling to hold onto their homes suffered. Individuals trying to make a slim profit on a mom-and-pop business were forced to close their doors. Senior citizens on a fixed income were forced to sell the homes they had lived in for decades.

But I’m not going to blame guys like Rauner and Pritzker, or even House Speaker Michael Madigan.

Despite all the evidence that the rich and powerful have manipulated the property tax system and treated school children like political pawns, the people of Illinois have decided to turn to billionaires to run the state.

Based on my experience, most Illinois residents still don’t understand that about 67 percent of the cost of education is paid for by property taxes. They haven’t bothered to research how Illinois ended up with the most discriminatory and economically unfair school funding system in the nation.

Pritzker’s switcheroo with the toilet seats to lower his property tax bill is merely symbolic of the way power brokers have ignored, abused and dumped on the children and homeowners of this state.

This has been no secret. Politicians from both parties, including the candidates for governor, repeatedly pound their chests claiming they are going to reform the system when they run for office. But the fact is they like the system as it exists. It works for them and their friends.

You’ll be pulling the toilets out of your own home to lower your property tax bill before the politicians make any significant changes.

Email: philkadner@gmail.com