Bang for the Buck

I actually liked Chicago Tribune reporter Eric Zorn’s retort to complaints about Illinois’s taxing and spending more than I expected to:

“It’s time to stop the madness and cut spending,” tweeted state Rep. David McSweeney, R-Barrington Hills, Friday morning, renewing his objection to the Democratic proposal to generate an estimated $3.4 billion a year by raising state income tax rates on the highest earners.

If only it were that easy! If only Illinois were a profligate outlier, levying obscenely high taxes and wasting it on fluffy, do-nothing, easy-to-slash programs, we could surgically tame the budget beast.

Adjusted for population size, Illinois ranks 34th in the nation in public welfare spending, 19th in spending on housing and community development, 15th in spending on elementary and secondary education and 13th in spending on highways, according to the COGFA report.

We rank a bit higher in state and local spending on jails and prisons (12th), police (sixth) and parks and recreation (fifth), but as former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner discovered when he attempted to take the scalpel to state spending, much of the fat has already been trimmed.

Comparing state spending in fiscal year 2000 with state spending in fiscal year 2019 adjusted for inflation, higher education is down 52%, human services and public safety are down 26%, health care is down 23% and net discretionary spending is down 20%, according to an analysis by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a liberal Chicago think tank.

The Kaiser Family Foundation found that Illinois ranked 37th in state-only spending per capita in 2017 and 43rd in Medicaid spending per enrollee in 2014, the most recent year available.

Neither Rep. McSweeney’s comments nor Mr. Zorn’s responses fairly represent Illinois’s problem. My gripe is not just that taxes or spending are too high but that we’re not getting what we’re paying for, our situation is bad and getting worse, and there is no remediation possible without cutting spending, something that is apparently beyond the pale.

Illinois’s schools rank 21st in the nation, its highways 28th, and crime 28th. In each of those cases higher is worse.

I think there’s a pattern emerging here. Illinoisans are willing to pay for what they’re actually getting but the state is paying for a lot more.

Illinois’s tax system is very regressive but I would be more enthusiastic about amending the state’s constitution to allow a graduated income tax if at the same time the state’s constitution were amended to allow the legislature to control the state’s spending on public pensions.

Illinois pays more than any other state to borrow. A graduated income tax alone or conjoined with a tax on legalized marijuana will not change that. It is losing net population rapidly. That means that a smaller population will be saddled with the spending obligations undertaken by a larger population. Increasing taxes only aggravates that problem. Illinois needs to attract businesses and workers not drive them away.