The “Turnaround Agenda”

Nowadays you can hardly listen to the news here in Chicago or read any news organ without stumbling across somebody kvetching about Gov. Rauner’s “turnaround agenda” for Illinois, ably summarized here at Illinois Policy by Jim Long:

The Turnaround Agenda addresses those areas of state government that have lead to a sputtering economy and a shrinking population. The major components of the plan include:

  • Transforming Illinois’ workers’ compensation system to bring costs in line with other states
  • Reforming the state’s judicial climate to rein in frivolous lawsuits
  • Adopting common-sense changes to unemployment insurance
  • Empowering voters to choose if workers should be forced to pay money to a union as a condition of an employment

Both houses of Illinois’s legislature have a veto-proof majority of Democrats, i.e. the Democrats don’t need the governor’s help to pass a budget. Nonetheless when the legislature enacted a budget that was $3 billion out of balance, did not include any of the spending cuts the governor had recommended, and Democrats refused to implement any of the governor’s “turnaround agenda”, the governor refused to sign the budget and that’s the impasse we have today. The governor brands the budget as “unbalanced” and “unconstitutional”; the Democrats kvetch that the governor is insisting that they cave on a lot of non-budget issues before giving his support.

You can hardly blame him. He doesn’t have much leverage over the Democratic legislative leadership and forcing them to shoulder responsibility for the consequences of their own folly alone is probably his strongest weapon.

I can add. And I’ve been predicting Illinois’s public pension catastrophe for years. However, I find myself in the position of Dickens’s Oliver: “Please sir, I want some more.” Even if absolutely everything in the governor’s “turnaround agenda” were implemented tomorrow, would that right Illinois’s fiscal ship in anything other geological time? I don’t see it.

Using ideas of formal logic that go back to Aristotle, while reforming Illinois’s public workers’ compensation, reforming the state’s “judicial climate”, changing unemployment insurance, and getting Illinois’s public employees’ unions out of the political contributions business may be necessary are they sufficient? I don’t think so. Even a tax freeze and bringing Illinois’s state minimum wage into line with that of the surrounding states would still leave Illinois very much where it is now which is not in a particularly good place. The “turnaround agenda” linked above does a pretty fair job of articulating the problem.

Left completely unaddressed is the problem of value. Illinoisans are paying a lot of government services but not receiving nearly enough in the way of value for their money. Add actual taxes paid to the corruption tax and you begin to get some idea of the scope of the problem.

I think that we deserve to know more than the necessary first steps. What would be sufficient to reverse Illinois’s decline?

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