I apologize for continuing to come back to this subject, and it is amazing that I have to, but Illinois Governor Pat Quinn gave another speech this past week about how Illinois needs to spend more money. At a time when, according to Moody’s Investors Service, Illinois has the lowest credit rating of any state in the country (not tied for lowest, but lower than any other state in the union), Governor Quinn talked in his State of the State speech about the “political courage” necessary to spend money. It’s almost like he hasn’t been paying attention for the last nine years.
His predecessor, and the person he ran with twice, came up with a great innovation on how to spend more money for programs but still keep your promise to not raise taxes: Don’t pay the bills. Which meant Illinois was going in the financial hole even before the economy collapsed in 2008.
So now Illinois has billions and billions of dollars of unpaid bills and its pension plans are the worst funded in the nation. And what does Pat Quinn think it takes political courage to do? Spend more money. No, Governor Quinn, spending money is easy. Political courage is paying the bills.
Democrats like to talk about how they care for people, but what caring is there is not paying people who provide services or products to the state? What caring is there in making small businesses or social service agencies take out loans (assuming they can even get one) to pay their employees because the state won’t pay them? What caring is there in not funding a pension plan that has to make retirees wonder whether they really will get the pension they are counting on? What caring is there in a Medicaid system whose patients doctors won’t treat because the state won’t pay them?
I will admit that Governor Quinn is not the only person who seems to think this way. When Democrats were raising the state income tax after the 2010 election and before the people elected in that election could take office, some legislators from the Chicago area were complaining that they were raising taxes, so they wanted more spending for their constituents (here and here). What? They already got the spending. The income tax was being raised to pay for money that was already spent. It was like these legislators didn’t have a grasp of reality. Like Governor Quinn.
Some people claim the problem is that Illinois can’t raise taxes on the rich because the Illinois Constitution requires a flat-rate income tax. That may be a problem, but it can’t be changed without a constitutional amendment. If, as Don Rumsfeld said, “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want,” then Illinois has to pay its bills with the taxes its constitution allows, not the ones some people might wish it could impose.
Many of the legislators, including some Democrats, wondered how Governor Quinn was planning on paying for all of these new programs. Even the Senate President said that he “look[ed] forward to hearing how we can fund these important priorities within a balanced budget.” But I hope people understand that “balanced budget” means more than just spending no more that what you take in. In Illinois, because of our irresponsible spending over the last decade and more, “balanced budget” has to mean spending less than we take in. Because we have to start paying the bills we haven’t paid and funding the pensions that we haven’t funded.
In other words, “political courage” isn’t spending more money when you don’t have it. Political courage is paying the bills you already have while doing the hard work of trying to figure out how you can provide as many services as you can to the people of Illinois for the amount of money you actually have.
I realize that this post sounds like a rant, and to the extent it is, I apologize. I would rather not do it. I prefer more measured discourse (even if sometimes it doesn’t seem like it). It is just that politicians who want to do the easy work of spending and promising without explaining how they are going to pay for their spending and promising drive me crazy.
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Update (2/4/12 4:15 pm): I changed the title of this post because the prior title, "Earth to Governor Quinn, Come In Governor Quinn" wasn't all that good for this post. Sorry for any confusion.
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