Illinois will tax your ass as the door hits it

Of course Wisconsin and Indiana are jubilant about the new Illinois tax hikes. Excerpt:

New Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker immediately rolled out a press release inviting Illinois businesses to decamp to the Badger State, contrasting his agenda to reduce taxes and welcome business with the Illinois increase. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels added: "We already had an edge on Illinois in terms of the cost of doing business, and this is going to make it significantly wider."

But people tend to stick with what they do best, not what works best, and raising taxes is what Democrats do.

Here's another great piece in WSJ discussing how this is going on all over the country, i.e., Repub-run states taking advantage of dysfunction Dem neighboring states. Excerpt:

Nevada's Brian Sandoval has vowed to kill the tax hikes passed by Democrats in 2009. This sounds good to California businesses, whose own new Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, has announced plans for a five-year extension of his state's 2009 "temporary" tax increases. In Iowa, South Carolina, Florida, you name it, new Republican governors have made top priorities of cutting or eliminating state corporate income taxes. The midterms handed many of these reformers enough allies in their state legislatures to pull some, or all, of this off.

Indiana GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels, who has spent six years taking competitive advantage of dysfunctional neighbors, jokes that living next to Illinois is like "living next to the Simpsons." He attests to the benefits, noting that Illinois-based Caterpillar recently chose to direct a major investment to build locomotives to Muncie, Ind. And while he recognizes he's now got some competition, he sees the combined force of reformers in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio creating a "divide that could operate long-term in the Midwest's favor."

I chuckle about all of this, but it's not really funny. There are people who are stuck in these states, at least for the moment, and are going to bear the brunt of the downward spiral.