As with any great mystery, the question is, how is Gov. Bruce Rauner going to get out of this mess?
You all know the plot. The state of Illinois owes more than $100 billion to its five pension funds. That’s long-term debt.
The state also has several billion dollars in unpaid bills and faces a shortfall of an additional $1.5 billion to $2 billion in the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. That budget shortfall is caused by the phasing out of the temporary income tax increase that began Jan. 1, and it will amount to a loss of about $4 billion during Rauner’s first budget.
Rauner has said he plans to slash state spending, increase school funding and freeze the property tax. He has also talked about imposing a sales tax on services,
Critics claim that the money from those new taxes won’t come close to offsetting the revenue lost from the income tax, that the governor has no power to freeze the property tax (which is imposed by local government, such as school districts) and there’s simply not enough money on hand to substantially increase education funding.
Those are simply Democratic naysayers and no-nothing media pundits, say the people who voted Rauner into office. It’s time to shake things up in Springfield. There’s billions of dollars in waste in state government, and our multimillionaire governor is just the mind to find it.
The plan, the secret strategy to accomplish all that, Rauner until now has kept secret. On Wednesday, the unveiling will take place in his first state budget address.
Democratic legislators are enthusiastically anticipating the speech because they believe that afterward their Republican counterparts in the Senate and House will feel the wrath of the masses throughout Illinois.
Special interest groups who help the needy will see their budgets cuts and begin holding news conferences throughout Illinois. TV stations will be running stories on children, the elderly and the handicapped, detailing their suffering if cuts are made.
Their will be outrage and panic in the streets.
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That’s the scenario that Democrats are hoping for, but I doubt Rauner will hand it over to them.
The governor’s new chairman of the state board of education, the Rev. James Meeks, of Chicago, signaled how things are going to go, I suspect, when he voted for a $700 million increase in education spending last month.
As I made clear in the opening paragraphs, the state has a multibillion-dollar budget hole without any increase in education spending. We all know that.
Former Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, was voted out of office, in part because he wanted to make that temporary income tax increase, imposed in January 2011, permanent to increase education funding by $1 billion.
Voters tired of higher taxes and increased spending said, “No.” Rauner told them the tax increase wasn’t needed to increase school spending.
So here we are. The moment of truth.
There’s a lot of ways to play games with the state budget process. The Democrats — while controlling the governor’s mansion, the Senate and the House — often seemed to operate with no budget at all. At least, nothing like the sort of budget that makes sense to normal people.
For example, last year, knowing that the income tax increase was set to expire Jan. 1, six months into the state’s fiscal year, the Democrats decided to pass a budget that included all anticipated revenue from the tax.
In the past, the state has borrowed money to pay for things the politicians included in the budget.
The biggest borrowing occurred from the state’s pension funds, when the state simply ignored its obligation to make mandatory payments to the funds. “Mandatory” is not a word that politicians in Illinois understand.
This being Illinois, the politicians don’t get blamed for stealing that pension money. In the eyes of many in the public, the retired teachers and other state workers, with their huge pension benefits, are the ones bankrupting the state.
Illinois, it could be argued, has also borrowed billions of dollars from the public schools. Under the state constitution, the state has the “primary responsibility for financing the system of public education.”
Governors and legislators, Republicans and Democrats, have interpreted this over the years to mean the state ought to supply about 30 percent of the money needed for education, sticking homeowners and other property owners with the rest of the tab through the property tax.
There’s no state in the nation that pays a smaller share of its public education bill. No state in the nation where property owners pay more in property tax.
In law enforcement circles, such behavior might be called a bait-and-switch. My Dad would have called it the old flimflam. In Springfield, it’s called smart politics.
Rauner, of course, has promised to change the way the game is played in this state. But then, in one of his first acts as governor, he hired a chief of staff for his wife at a salary of $100,000.
On Wednesday, the hope is that all will be revealed. Finally, Rauner will give us the road map, the detailed plan for how he plans to cut the state budget and raise enough money to increase education spending.
I recently used a Mapquest iPhone app while traveling to Chicago, and the voice confidently guided me to a dead-end street.
I contacted the company and complained that I was told to go straight ahead where no road existed. I was told the mistake must have been mine.
Laying out a road map is easy, especially if the final destination is unknown.