The biggest problem with passing Governor Pat Quinn's tax-hike and budget proposals is not that almost every Statehouse interest group opposes them.

The Illinois Federation of Teachers, for instance, sent out a statement before Quinn had even finished his budget address to say that any state legislator who votes for the governor's proposed "pension cuts" would automatically lose the union's endorsement.

State workers are spitting mad about paying more into the pension plan and being forced to take unpaid days off.

Business groups are beside themselves about the tax hikes.

Mayors hate the idea that they won't get their usual 10-percent slice of Quinn's proposed income-tax increase.

These are very serious, almost insurmountable obstacles, of course. But they're not the worst.

The biggest hurdle, by far, is that the governor focused on a problem that he alone wants to deal with, but that nobody else really cares about.

The governor, you already know, wants to raise the state's personal income tax rate from 3 percent to 4.5 percent, but also triple the $2,000 personal exemption so that almost 5 million people will get a tax cut or pay no extra taxes. Quinn claims this is about "tax fairness" as much as it is about raising new money to close the state's $11.5-billion budget deficit.

But, seriously, when was the last time you heard anybody complain about the Illinois income tax?

At just 3 percent, Illinois has the lowest flat tax in the nation. Quinn has pushed this tax-fairness idea for decades, but almost nobody else has. Tripling the personal exemption is just not something that any legislator has ever cared much about.

Since the governor's tax proposal has no real constituency within the General Assembly, he starts out with almost no legislative allies.

Just about every member of the Illinois General Assembly has fervently campaigned to reduce the property-tax burden and increase spending for schools. Also, suburban Cook County and Chicago legislators are hearing loud and constant screams of anger from their voters about their region's super-high sales tax.

There are some very angry everyday people demanding a solution to these festering problems. Yet Quinn's budget and tax-hike proposals do nothing about any of them.

In fact, the governor's proposals may be making the political situation for incumbent legislators far worse than they would be with a more "normal" tax hike and budget fix.

For one, the governor has proposed a relatively tiny education-spending increase. That pretty much guarantees some local school districts, which are also experiencing serious problems in this economy, will have to raise property taxes even higher.

Local governments are strapped in this economy as well and are dying for money. Without help from the state via their usual share of the income-tax hike, they may also have to raise sales or property taxes.

Quinn wants to expand the state sales tax to cover items such as grooming and hygiene products, sweetened tea, and coffee drinks that are currently exempted from the full sales tax rate. That's not really a big thing, but in this sort of environment it could make for big headlines.

And, not surprisingly, legislators aren't particularly thrilled with voting for Quinn's 50-percent income-tax hike and still having to vote for well over a billion dollars in state budget cuts. Quinn's tax-exemption reform proposal took a tax hike that could've raised almost $6 billion down to only about $2.5 billion.

The governor said on Friday that he hoped he could convince the business lobby to support his tax hike by showing them how he's forcing teachers and state workers to pay more into the pension systems. But it's the height of folly to assume that the business lobby will ever get behind a tax hike.

The only groups that can be counted on to reliably support tax hikes are the very groups that Quinn has gone out of his way to whack. Public-school teachers, state workers, and people such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley are absolutely key, and all of them are firmly in the "no" category.

I still think there will be a state tax increase in our near future. I just don't think yet that it'll be this one. Quinn has a horrific fight ahead of him.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter) and TheCapitolFaxBlog.com.

The British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) turns out to have been something of a prophet. He once wrote that "practical men," as opposed to theoreticians, "are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Ironically, the defunct economist who is influencing Barack Obama, his advisers, and his supporters in Washington is Keynes himself.

Like a ghostly presence, Keynes' ideas are hovering over us. The very notion of a government "stimulus" for the economy originated in Keynes' 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, & Money. In it, Keynes spelled out his theory that government could offset the economic ups and downs of the business cycle with "contracyclical" policies -- that is, by running surpluses when economic activity is vibrant and deficits during slowdowns.

Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe" or "promoting democracy" or "protecting their strategic interests."

Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up check points on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.

Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers' attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. Imagine if most of the citizens of the foreign land also wanted these troops to return home. Imagine if they elected a leader who promised to bring them home and put an end to this horror.

Imagine if that leader changed his mind once he took office.

The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment towards us.

According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn't stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason? These are not embassies, mind you, these are military installations. The new administration is not materially changing anything about this. Shuffling troops around and playing with semantics does not accomplish the goals of the American people, who simply want our men and women to come home. 50,000 troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States.

Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity. It is the only foreign policy that will not bankrupt us in short order, as our current actions most definitely will. I share the disappointment of the American people in the foreign policy rhetoric coming from the administration. The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

Orginally published March 9, 2009 at Congressman Ron Paul's House website blog entitled Texas Straight Talk.

The number of unemployed people in Iowa increased to 80,600 in January, surpassing the 80,000 mark for the first time since September 1987, Iowa Workforce Development announced this week. That's up from 73,700 in December, and 64,900 a year ago.

"Jobless claims remain very elevated, and continue to point to large payroll losses," said Elisabeth Buck, director of Iowa Workforce Development. "The major share of Iowa's job losses since January 2008 occurred during the final four months of the year."

The state's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate increased to 4.8 percent in January, up from December's revised rate of 4.4 percent and last year's rate of 3.9 percent. The total number of working Iowans dropped to 1,592,100 in January from 1,602,900 in December.