By Ted Dabrowski -
Gov. Bruce Rauner’s leadership failures have deflated the political pressure for spending and economic reforms in Illinois.
For three years, he couldn’t convince the legislature to pursue his reform agenda. He made things worse when he abandoned those reforms over time. As a result, the end of the two-year budget impasse left Illinoisans with no reforms and a 32 percent income tax hike. Now, in his latest budget address, Rauner has willingly embracedthe tax hike he opposed just months ago. Gone is the reformer who would turn around Illinois.
But while Rauner deserves his share of the blame for Illinois’ continued decline, the reform policies he initially espoused can’t be blamed. They were never implemented. Other than a misguided increase in funding for K-12 education, Rauner’s reforms were constantly rejected by House Speaker Mike Madigan.
The reality is Illinois declined due to the status-quo agenda set by Madigan and the state's former governors, from Jim Edgar to Pat Quinn. It’s their policies that are still locked in place. Illinois still has the same fake budget process. The same punishingworkers’ comp laws. The same restrictive labor laws. Growing pension promises.More borrowing. And ever-increasing property and income tax burdens.
Rauner didn't succeed in bringing about change. But his inability to reform anything, ironically, only strengthens the case for structural reforms. The longer Illinois’ status quo policies remain in place, the more this state will continue to decline.
Anyone honestly seeking a balanced picture of why reforms are so urgent – and an understanding of why the status quo has to change immediately – should examine the facts before and during Rauner’s term. Illinois’ destructive status quo will become quite apparent. Take five examples:
- Illinois manufacturing lagged that of its Midwest peers long before Rauner took office. Since 2000, Illinois has lost more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs, or nearly a third of its manufacturing base, to other states and countries. Over 98 percent of those losses happened before Rauner’s term.
- The budget impasse propelled spending, and consequently, the state’s unpaid bills, to a record $16 billion. But Illinois’ backlog has been a chronic problem since at least 2001, the last year that Illinois had a balanced budget. Unpaid bills reached as high as $9 billion in 2013, two years before Rauner took office.
- Illinois’ unbalanced budgets and growing pension liabilities led to 13 credit downgrades between 2009 and 2013, all under Gov. Quinn’s watch. Five of those downgrades occurred during the 2011-2014 tax hike. In fact, Illinois was already the nation's worst-rated state by 2010.
- In 2000, the shortfall in the state’s pension funds equaled $16 billion. By the time Rauner was elected in 2014, it had already ballooned to $105 billion. Politicians “fixes” resorted to borrowing and tax increases. That was a mistake. More money only fueled an increase in out-of-control total pension benefits owed to state workers and retirees.
- In 2016 and 2017, Illinois netted record domestic outmigration losses of 110,000 and 115,000, respectively. Critics blame Rauner and his policies for that outflow, but once again, they ignore the fact that people were fleeing Illinois long before then. From 2000-2014, Illinois lost a net of more than one million people to other states. That’s the equivalent of wiping Aurora, Rockford, Joliet, Naperville, Springfield, Peoria, Elgin and Waukegan off the map.
Finally changing the status quo
Rauner's record has made it easy for lawmakers to divert the failures of the status quo – most of them decades old – onto him and, more importantly, his attempts at change. That may doom Illinois to many years without any new efforts to pass comprehensive reforms.
That should not be the case. The worsening of every financial and economic statistic during Rauner's term serves as a powerful condemnation of Illinois’ status quo. The reality is, Illinois' long-term decline belongs to career politicians like Madigan.
That fact should be used as ammunition to repel any proposed tax hikes and to promote tax relief.
It proves, in combination with Wirepoints’ recent research on pension benefit growth, that Illinois needs aggressive action to cut the cost of benefits today and to end pensions going forward.
And it shows Illinois needs aggressive workers’ comp and labor reforms to create and attract jobs for Illinoisans.
All these reforms, and more, should be bipartisan. These changes aren’t about left or right, Republican or Democrat.
They’re about making Illinois livable again for all Illinoisans.
