Will legislators finally do what must be done?
Comments (...)Is this the year the Illinois Legislature summons the courage to seriously address the state’s fiscal crisis?
Or will this be yet another opportunity squandered by cowardly avoidance of tough budget issues?
This isn’t a challenge just for legislators of both parties.
This is just as much a challenge to all of us voters, who will have every seat in the Illinois House and Senate on the ballot in 2012.
If the Legislature fails to make a good faith effort toward solving the state’s financial mess, voters have every right – and responsibility – to pronounce a political death sentence for every incumbent in November.
LAST SPRING, A POLL sponsored by the Illinois Press Association found that 84.2 percent of households in this state have only some or very little confidence in their state government.
So if the Legislature continues to neglect the state’s serious problems, no one will be surprised.
Voters are understandably skeptical that the state’s political leaders are willing to do what needs to be done.
That would include putting partisanship aside and making tough decisions regardless of political consequences.
That would require developing a plan of shared sacrifice that fairly spreads the pain we all must surely suffer.
That would mean having the guts to say, “I’m sorry; we cannot afford that.”
And that would involve considerably more statesmanship than these legislators have ever shown.
GOV. PAT QUINN is a Democrat.
Democrats also control both the Illinois House and Senate.
Obviously, leadership for significant changes must begin there.
Democrats, therefore, will likely feel the political pain if the Legislature again fails to perform in the public interest
But Republicans have a key role, too. They, after all, never tried to set the state on a sound fiscal path in the years they held the governor’s office and had superior numbers in the General Assembly.
And their role as the minority in recent years has been wasted in trying to make Democrats take the full blame for what will necessarily be publicly unpopular decisions about taxation and spending.
Is it possible for the politicians of both parties to think more about the next generation than the next election?
ILLINOIS IS NOT A lot different from Rhode Island.
Both are “blue” states where public employee unions have for many years helped – through their campaign money and muscle – to ensure Democratic domination of state government.
Both states have a history of corruption that has seen state officials go to prison for their crimes.
And both have struggled for years under the burden of a fiscally unsound and unsustainable pension system for government workers – one with ever expanding benefits but no offset through increased funding.
The difference is that Rhode Island, this past November, finally made the difficult decisions required to fix the system.
Will Illinois be next?
RHODE ISLAND’S FIX was the focus of an article last month in Time magazine.
Here is a paragraph from that article that speaks of facts that public employees have had to face in regard to their pension. By removing specific references to Rhode Island, it addresses the Illinois situation perfectly.
“Perhaps they and thousands of other ... public employees should never have believed in their pensions to begin with. Then it wouldn’t hurt so much when the fantasy finally came to an end – the fantasy of ever more retirees’ living ever longer lives, receiving ever growing checks from a half-empty fund. But it’s hard to fault the workers; denial has been a state-sponsored pastime ... for decades.”
In Rhode Island, newly elected state Treasurer Gina Raimondo and state lawmakers “risked their political lives to put the Rhode Island retirement system on solid footing, ...” Time reported.
“[T]his is about math,” Raimondo said, “not politics.”
Illinois politicians can surely do the math.
The question is, Are they willing to risk the power and prestige of their political positions to do what needs to be done?
JUST HOW DID STATE leaders in Rhode Island take on the pension problem?
They ended guaranteed cost-of-living increases for at least 5 years.
They tied future benefit increases to the overall health of the pension fund.
They gradually raised the retirement age to be the same as that of Social Security.
They replaced a plan of defined future benefits for retirees “into a two-headed hybrid,” Time reported, with “a diminished guaranteed pension together with a defined-contribution plan along the lines of a 401(k).”
And they applied the changes to current retirees as a matter of “simple fairness,” Raimondo said.
MAKE NO MISTAKE, fixing Illinois’ broken pension system isn’t the sole answer to the state’s financial problems.
Last year’s increase in the state income tax was part of the solution – a step Democrats took with no Republican support, though no one should be foolish enough to think the problem can be addressed solely on the spending side.
Democratic legislators took that step – that easy step – to boost revenue, then punted to Gov. Quinn the much more difficult step of making serious cuts in expenses.
Quinn last week promised to reform public employee pensions “once and for all” this spring as a first step toward expense control.
But House Speaker Michael Madigan has refused to address spending without broad bipartisan support to ensure that Democrats don’t take the political fall for tough decisions that must be made.
And Republicans, who smell blood in the electoral waters in the aftermath of corruption convictions of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, see no political advantage in cooperating on a plan that could look like a victory for the majority Democrats.
That’s how politics are played.
HOW MUCH PAIN are you willing to suffer?
We’ve heard this community’s loud rejection of a proposal to close the Mabley Center in Dixon in a move to more cost-efficient group homes to care for the developmentally disabled.
We’ve groused about the temporary closings of state parks in our park-rich region, but no one seems excited about a user fee to help support the facilities.
We’ve complained about a “temporary” increase in the income tax to bolster the state’s sagging revenues. In this year’s election, we’ll choose the legislators who will decide whether to extend that tax beyond 2014.
If Illinois is going to fix its fiscal problems, two things must happen:
1) Legislators – Democrats and Republicans – will have to risk their political futures.
2) Everybody will have to suffer – in both personal finances and personal inconveniences.
Frankly, we have seen little evidence to suggest that anyone is prepared to do what must be done.
Comments
Total Comments 0 View/Add Comments |
There have been no comments made about this story. |
