Congratulations on your raise! On Thursday, the four-year income tax hikes that Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law will begin to roll back. You'll keep more of the money you earn.

Your raise also is a victory because you won it. The Nov. 4 election for governor was a referendum on Quinn's awkward proposition to voters. Essentially: You have to re-elect me so I can make my temporary tax increase on your earnings permanent. Because without this revenue, we can't keep spending as much as we do.

Hmm. Voters instead elected Bruce Rauner, who wants to eliminate the entire income tax increase over four years.

Even as your income tax rate recedes, it still will be 25 percent higher than it was before Democratic legislators passed the tax increase on 1/11/11 — their night of infamy in, yes, a lame-duck session — without one Republican vote. Their law raised the personal rate from 3 percent to 5 percent for these four years; as of Jan. 1 the rate slips to 3.75 percent. The law raised the total corporate tax rate from 7.3 percent to 9.5 percent; that total rate now drops to 7.75 percent. The decreases will cost Springfield perhaps $2 billion for the remaining six months of fiscal 2015, and $4 billion annually after that.

Whenever you hear opponents of this rollback (aka your pay raise) say Illinois can't live with less revenue, remember: This is the tax scheme Democrats alone wrote into law. And, last January, House Speaker Michael Madigan proposed an even deeper slash of the total corporate rate, to 6 percent. That suggests Madigan understands that Illinois has been at a disadvantage in competing for jobs with Indiana, Michigan, Missouri and many other states. But nothing came of his initiative.

For four years, Illinoisans watched other states rebound from the Great Recession while their state languished. The tax hike brought Springfield more than $30 billion in revenue — equal to almost a whole year's operating budget. But the improved credit rating and the truly balanced budgets that Democrats promised on 1/11/11? Those never arrived.

Those failures nixed the assumption of some Democratic elders that voters would forget their imposition of the income tax hike. By last spring, many Democratic legislators were refusing to break their public pledges to vote against making those hikes permanent. This page offered reminders to individual legislators, including one editorial headlined, "Knock knock. Your promise is here."

The whole sorry episode was a political miscalculation by the Dems: When Madigan counted noses in his 71-member caucus on May 21, only 34 Democrats favored keeping the higher tax rates.

At that low point, lawmakers made matters worse by passing a bogus budget for the year that started July 1. In October the nonpartisan Civic Federation of Chicago identified a host of misleading gimmicks in the budget, and said that rather than reducing spending by $1.1 billion, it increases spending by $528 million. Yet it still underfunds agencies by $470 million. Rauner blames the mess he inherits on "fundamentally dishonest" budgeting. Who can argue?

Democrats can work with Rauner to close their shortfalls, or they can fight his every step. We've said before that he and they likely have different ideas on what Springfield "needs" or "must have" or "can't possibly cut." On revenues, he's talked of broadening the sales tax base to include not only goods but services. Good.

As you enjoy your pay raise, recall how little improvement these tax hikes brought to state finances — and how much they damaged the Illinois economy.

Above all, remember that you and other taxpayers won this raise on Election Day.

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