Carbondale, IL— Green Party gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney blasted the latest proposal by his Republican challenger State Senator Bill Brady today. In one of the few times that he has given any insight into his budget plan, Brady suggested that if elected governor, he would press for greater tax cuts for businesses.

“Brady is now trying to bring back ‘Reaganomics’ at the state level, forgetting that Ronald Reagan gave us the highest federal deficits in our nation’s history at the time,” Whitney commented. “We can’t afford any of Bill Brady’s fuzzy math and a new experiment in ‘trickle down economics’ when we know that doesn’t work. We need real solutions to the budget crisis.”

Whitney elaborated that “one problem is that Brady will be destroying even more public sector jobs due to the higher deficit and his proposed spending cuts, which will have a spillover effect on private sector retailers, causing even more job losses. There is no reason to believe that the plan will create more jobs than it will destroy.”

“Second, we know from experience at the federal level that some employers will game the system by either claiming the tax credit for jobs they were going to create anyway, or by firing permanent employees and then rehiring ‘new’ employees, or in some cases, every couple of months repeating the process and hiring new temporary employees to fill the same positions and grab as many of the tax credits as they can. Thus, they will not really be creating a net increase in employment. It will be next to impossible to police such practices to stop abuses, especially by a state government that is already strained to the breaking point.”

Whitney concluded that “from start to finish, this is a horrible proposal. It is bad for the budget, bad for the economy and bad for working people. Under the guise of being a jobs plan, this really amounts to another taxpayer subsidy for private profiteering and big business. That’s Bill Brady’s real agenda. Working people shouldn’t fall for this snake oil. I remain the only candidate who actually has a plan.”