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group promoting the progressive income tax amendment funded by Gov. J.B.
Pritzker spent between $10,000 and $15,000 to promote a screenshot of a fake
tweet about the progressive tax on Facebook.
Vote Yes for Fairness published a screenshot of a tweet from an account named @liz_uihlein
in a Facebook post that has not been taken down. They paid so more Facebook
users saw the faked tweet and they used it to claim Illinois needs a tax hike on
the rich by painting them as indifferent to working people.
Liz Uihlein of Lake Forest is the president of Uline. She and
her husband in 1980 started the shipping and container products distributor in
their basement and grew it to more than 6,500 employees.
“On behalf of Uline, … the alleged Liz Uihlein Twitter account was a fake
account,” said Ellie O’Neil, a publicist with Mueller Communications LLC. “After
being reported to Twitter, the fake account has been removed by Twitter for
impersonation.”
Vote Yes for Fairness took a screenshot of the tweet just 48 seconds after it
was released. Their Facebook post has received over 1,100 reactions and nearly
200 shares. Ad data from Facebook shows the promoted post earned more than 1
million impressions.
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Pritzker has donated $56.5 million to the group,
largely funding the organization by himself.
If passed, the progressive income tax amendment
could open the door to new forms of taxation in Illinois. The
progressive tax would make a retirement tax, city income tax and
double taxation much more likely. It would impose a marriage penalty
on 4 million Illinoisans and because it is not tied to inflation,
would grow the state’s definition of “rich” each year.
In addition, tax rates passed separate from the amendment could be
devastating for Illinois job creators as they struggle to recover
from COVID-19. Small businesses, which create 60% of Illinois’ jobs,
will see up to a 47% income tax hike. When combined with existing
federal taxes, small businesses could see as much as a 50.3%
marginal income tax rate. Some small businesses would face a state
income tax hike five times larger than big businesses.
When a campaign is so desperate that it needs to
manufacture fake tweets, voters should question what else it is
making up. His group paying to push fiction certainly doesn’t help
anyone trust Pritzker’s claim that his “fair tax” will only affect
the rich.
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