"Raise their taxes to save my job!"

I would be amused by government employees clamoring for yet another Illinois tax increase if their influence weren’t so strong. It wasn’t so long ago that I engaged in heated debates on Facebook with government employees and employees of organizations dependent on government funding. They desperately implored their friends to contact their representatives in Springfield to support the income tax increase. (As far as I can tell, our representatives in Springfield love tax increases.) Michael Medved put it best this week in commenting on pro-tax demonstrators:

Their presence highlighted the danger of constantly swelling government payrolls: the more people get hired by government, the more people will demand raising taxes on others to protect their own jobs, salaries and benefits. The idea that pro-tax demonstrators are more idealistic or selfless than the anti-tax crowd is, simply, laughable.