Chicago Tribune Editorial: Last chance

Chicago Tribune Editorial: Last chance
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
March 20, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-finances0321-20100320,0,6022387.story


When your strategy is delay-and-deny, you have chosen to be obsolete. Reasonable people want to elbow you aside and make way for problem-solvers. That's why, in America's private sector, a generation of managers who confused mastery of the status quo with aggressive response to crises has been shoved into early retirement. Those execs lacked the skills to quickly re-engineer failing businesses. To make unfamiliar, uncomfortable, unpopular decisions. To halt death spirals. Many of those ex-bosses now call themselves "consultants."

Day by do-little day, the leadership rank in Illinois government looks more like a breeding ground for consultants. An epic challenge has brought not an epic response, but rather a pattern of petrified inaction and bizarre belief that revenue is sure to rebound. Faced with problems largely of their own making, these people merely shift the blame to national economic trends. They behave as though they are helpless. And perhaps they are. We, the voters and taxpayers, are not.

We are, though, financially liable for their wreckage — our leaders' legacy of unpaid bills, astonishing debts, yet still more borrowing that essentially rolls our mammoth obligations from one credit card to the next. Their legacy includes a state tax scheme that discourages new business investment: The state that ranks a pathetic 48th in job creation now suffers an unemployment rate of 12.2 percent, the highest in 27 years. Here's a damning metric: The January jobless rate in all 12 Illinois metro areas exceeded the previous year's rate — for the 32nd consecutive month.

As job numbers shrink, those among us still fortunate enough to have jobs must pay for our lawmakers' habitual recklessness. State government's free-fall into insolvency was designed intentionally and executed methodically. Over the years, legislators devoted more to hoarding power and ensuring their re-election than to smart governance. They repeatedly created employee benefits, entitlement coverage and spending obligations that the people of Illinois cannot pay as costs come due.

Who's to blame? Not Pat Quinn — at least, not until he became governor and replaced his demand to "Cut, cut, cut!" with an election-cycle whimper: I would pander to everyone rather than make an enemy of anyone.

No, the blame falls on a couple of defrocked governors and on an ossified General Assembly that has promised away much of Illinois' future. The speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, is completing his 40th year in that chamber. The president of the Senate, John Cullerton, is completing his 20th year in that chamber — preceded by 12 years in the House. Both men held leadership jobs before ascending to their current posts. They have spent 72 years in Springfield. What financial policymaking they have not enacted, they have cheered from box seats.

•••

Right now, Madigan and Cullerton bear the burden of reforming what they and others in Springfield have mismanaged.

Or Madigan and Cullerton can continue to delay and deny. They can make little incremental gestures to spending reform, as they made little incremental gestures to ethics reform in 2009.

But if Madigan and Cullerton won't meet their burden, then voters across this state bear a different burden: to identify Madigan's and Cullerton's caucus members — their timid, dependent enablers — and retire as many of them as possible.

Parents of schoolchildren, university students, families of people who rely on health, disability and other social services: If your current legislature won't reform how Illinois spends money, you have a choice. You can re-elect lawmakers who, for two decades, have grown state obligations at twice the rate of inflation. Or you can mobilize en masse and elect a responsive new legislature.

Because if Madigan and Cullerton, with those 72 years in Springfield, continue to fail at responding boldly to this epic moment, you need to curtail their clout.

•••

With this so-far useless legislative session, Madigan and Cullerton have a last chance to make major changes, none more important than reforming Illinois' lavish public pensions. Consider: Quinn threatens — until he inevitably caves to public pressure — to cut $1.3 billion in education funding. He talks of schools laying off thousands of teachers as if he's slyly holding educators hostage, the better to extort support for tax hikes. Yet the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago offers an excellent plan to cut state pension benefits going forward and save more than $2 billion annually. If Illinois lawmakers enact that proposal alone, school districts won't have to fire all those teachers.

Madigan and Cullerton will decide whether Illinois immediately makes massive reductions to overhead costs, just as thousands of Illinois businesses have done. And after Madigan and Cullerton decide, then we voters will decide what to do about their rank-and-file members. About their legislative majorities. About their now-unchecked power.

So today we start a new calendar. The last one, "Your sales tax calendar," helped convince several spendaholic Cook County Board members that voters would fire them if they kept focusing on what government "needs" rather than on what workers and their employers can afford.

This calendar will tick off the 226 days until voters select the next Illinois legislature and fill other important posts, from U.S. senator through governor and on to the bottom of the ballot.

What will Madigan and Cullerton make of their last-chance opportunity? Will they march their members in competitive districts straight off a cliff?

•••

Voices outside official Springfield — motto: We do it our way because you don't stop us — have suggested multiple ways of cutting that overhead. Quinn's mantra that tax increases will restore Illinois is malarkey left over from St. Paddy's Day.

Quinn's tax increases would, though, make this state even less competitive than our lawmakers already have made it. Raise the price of doing business here — Illinois' business tax climate has fallen in rank to 30th — and the leaders who run Springfield will create new jobs, all right. Those jobs will be in Indiana, to name one of the many predators out to snare prospective employers that higher-tax states such as Illinois drive their way.

Three weeks ago in this space, we offered "A no-tax-hike option," a list of financial proposals for Medicaid, education, pensions, capital improvements, subsidies to local governments, privatizing internal services, selling surplus assets and so forth. The minimum $6.4 billion in annual savings would eliminate the state's budget shortfall — in truth, it has accumulated over several years, not just one — in two years. In year three, Illinois would turn a surplus.

Last week the Illinois Policy Institute offered a different path to the same end: a no-tax-hike budget. This proposal, at IllinoisPolicy.org, is bracing and ambitious, with useful, line-by-line comparisons to the current budget and the one Quinn proposes. John Tillman, the group's CEO, says his proposal "would cause some heartburn." But, like the Tribune's plan, it also would stop the pension monster from steadily crowding out education and other services.

The politicians who run Illinois don't want to admit how their decades of spending more than Illinois collects has driven this state toward being New California, New Michigan. House Speaker Madigan, Senate President Cullerton, do not continue to delay and deny. Radically reform how Illinois spends the billions we entrust to you. If you keep waiting for the Nov. 2 election to pass, you raise the already excellent odds that several of your pet legislators pass with it.