In case you haven't noticed, there's been a lot of hand-wringing lately about education spending in Illinois.

Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich wants to increase the contribution the state makes to local school districts, while leaving the current property tax in place, by increasing taxes on... somebody.

At this point, it's not quite clear who "God" Rod wants to put the arm on for the extra revenue.

In addition to school spending, the guv wants to fund his universal healthcare initiative.

His first idea was a more onerous tax on corporations, one that is applied to "gross receipts" so as to mitigate the impact of deductions and tax return finagling. That one went down rather ignominiously when the legislature voted it down without a single vote on the governor's side.

Since then, the state has passed a one-month temporary budget that maintained the status quo, and now sits at the horns of a dilemma.

Rod still wants his extra spending, and he's proposed a number of other tax increases to offset it, most recently a tax on cigarettes.

The legislators (or more pointedly, the legislative leadership) prefer to leave things pretty much the way they are. They preach that the state needs to "live within its means" by prioritizing the state's budget needs.

It's all a shell game, unless someone, somewhere, puts income tax back on the table.

Blagojevich famously promised not to raise state income taxes when he was first elected. He has held true to that promise, even while stretching things a bit by saying he won't support a tax increase on "the people."

The sinister thing about his stance is that all of the tax increases he proposes are essentially "on the people." Basically, he only wants to increase taxes "people who do bad things," like smokers, gamblers, drinkers, rapacious corporations, etc.

That's okay, but part of the social engineering of sin taxes is that it allegedly serves two purposes. First, it taxes bad behavior. Second, it is supposed to serve as a disincentive to bad behavior.

So in theory, a tax on a pack of cigarettes not only raises revenue now, but saves on healthcare expenses later, because it's presumed that, with higher taxes, fewer people will smoke.

If that theory plays out, sin tax revenue will eventually dry up, and governments will move on to less serious "sins" to find the lost revenue.

All of the mechanisms legislators put in place to generate additional revenue are dishonest. The way I see it, the only honest tax is an income tax.

The other taxes are popular with politicians because they are more palatable to "the people." They seem like taxes on "them," on a margin of society. Unfortunately, they all get around to "us" eventually.

God Rod has vilified the income tax as a tax "on the people." And oddly enough, he has done so with the misguided complicity of "the people."

Illinoisans are known as being among the more tax-averse constituencies in the nation, and many among us are fiercely proud of holding the line on income taxes.

As a result, we also have taxes and fees on property, sales, gross receipts, alcohol, amusements, gasoline, tobacco, insurance premiums, pari-mutuel betting, utilities, selected luxury items, and coming soon, the air that you breathe.

Heck, about ten years ago, we abolished a tax on personal (non real-estate) property, and legislators didn't even bother with the normal subterfuge of naming it something it wasn't. Corporate tax rates were nearly doubled, and legislators baldly called it the "personal property replacement tax."

The people who represent us are spiders, and all the little taxes and fees that are enacted are their web of lies, spun in an effort to avoid the third rail of Illinois politics, education funding reform.

The dirty truth is that there is already more than enough money being spent on schools in Illinois to very well educate all of our children, each to his or her own ability.

The problem is in the distribution. Everyone knows it, yet no one will do anything about it.

Because education spending in Illinois is so heavily reliant on property tax (somewhere around 65 percent of all property taxes are used to fund education), our public schools are set up to provide a better education for rich kids than for the poor or middle-class.

That's right, set up. It didn't happen by accident.

It's no accident that rich people prefer property taxes to income taxes, because it usually represents a lower percentage of their assets and income than it does to the average Joe or Jane.

It's no accident that the people who want to change the system, to shift the burden from property to income taxes, are those who suffer the most, farmers with large property holdings but modest incomes, senior citizens who don't want to leave their homes but can barely afford the taxes, the middle class who see ever-expanding chunks of their earnings eaten up by taxes.

It's no accident that the very wealthy exert their influence not through volume, but by the subtlety of campaign contributions, which ties things up in a nice neat little bow. They practice a form of "free speech" with which most of us ordinary folk are not familiar.

Illinois public schools in certain areas of suburban Chicago are basically private schools in a thin disguise. Schools are routinely equipped with swimming pools and palatial athletic facilities, and course offerings are as diverse as many colleges.

You can read all the newspaper accounts of the budget standoff, and find out which politician fired off the best one-liner, but it's an exercise to avoid the real question about the financing of public education.

Do rich kids deserve a better public education than poor kids?

Because that's the status quo, and neither God Rod's nor the legislature's plan addresses it.