Cut the Fat
But the far less soothing reality is that we could make legislators serve for free and barely ding the deficit. We could shutter five universities and close down departments that patrol our highways, guard and conserve our natural resources, serve senior citizens and veterans and protect the public health — and still not eradicate the red ink, let alone protect and invest in our children and in the roads, bridges and other infrastructure vital to economic development.
More than 90 percent of general revenue funds support education, health care, services for the needy, law enforcement and pensions.
Even while in the grip of an unemployment-escalating, insecurity-abetting economy, can we diminish or even continue to tolerate substandard resources for youngsters in any corner of Illinois and abide academic achievement gaps between whites and burgeoning minorities without ultimately yielding good jobs to other states and countries that offer better educated and trained workers?
Can we gut already insufficient funding for community-based mental health and substance abuse treatment without betraying our shared humanity, allowing potentially productive citizens to become chronically dependent and filling our jails and prisons at far greater cost to taxpayers?
We should excise spending excesses, resist new government initiatives until we fund existing ones and insist on reforms and better results, especially in education. But Illinois is not going to regain sound fiscal footing and well serve coming generations without a regimen of tax increases and budgetary discipline.
One of the basic things many people don’t understand is that the money is already spent. While Illinois has technically balanced its budget each year, that has no relationship to reality where bills are put off for the first of the next fiscal year to be on the next years books and everything is moved back and back and back to where we are now near a breaking point. On top of that, the pension obligations are underfunded and need to be caught up.
It’s not a matter of raising taxes for more programs, it’s a matter of paying the bills we have already incurred.