The Illinois spiral-As Heard on Rush Limbaugh

April 11, 2010



History often occurs with such bombast that we couldn't miss it if we tried: a climactic battle, a pivotal court decree, the inauguration of an African-American president. Other times, history evolves quietly via the Law of Accumulation: Little things add up.


Illinois is suffering one of those subtler but game-changing passages today. Our state is in a downward spiral that, yes, still can be reversed. First, though, we have to admit that we are not the Illinois that was — the muscular producer and processor and manufacturer that could stare a stranger in the eye and convincingly boast: Move here and prosper!

Few of us, or our ancestors, gravitated to this state for its prairie scenery or bipolar climate. Illinois instead promised near-unrivaled opportunity: its rich soil, its wealth of industries, its human hustle frenetic to make a buck.

Today, though, we are losing employers. Nearly half a million of our jobs are gone. We export many of our educated young people to futures out of state.

We can wait, paralyzed, and hope that economic recovery eventually means full employment recovery. Or we can make structural changes now that would welcome the makers of jobs.

We need to lower costs. Our governance infrastructure has become overgrown and overpriced. We have 7,000 often redundant governments, far more than any other state. We populate those governments with armies of employees, and give them duties — some essential, some make-work. Many politicians of both parties enlist these workers as their allies in a cozy paradigm: If you help us win re-election, we will reward you with adequate salaries today — and fabulous retirement benefits tomorrow.

Those pols treat the public sector with fawning reverence while ignoring, or even scorning, a private sector that supplies their lifeblood revenues. Why so? Because the pols and their allies have a good thing going, and no incentive to disrupt it. So, unlike in scrappier states, there is precious little talk in Illinois of curtailing teacher tenure, or reducing benefits for current public employees, or capping government expenditures, or exterminating townships and other costly relics, or demolishing obsolete institutions, or ...

Recession, though, has forced a reckoning: Our shrinking and salary-squeezed private sector work force cannot adequately support many of our state's households — let alone sustain our antiquated overlays of taxing bodies.

This should be a time of tremendous opportunity for leaders who, rather than hiding from recession, exploit it to reinvent Illinois. To radically reshape the state's present and its future. To capitalize on employers' problems in other high-cost states by making Illinois their low-cost place to do business. To grow jobs.

Instead, our Statehouse brims with defensive, small-think pols hoping to survive another election.
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We speak of this Illinois spiral not as fatalistic Chicken Littles but as true believers who fiercely don't want this to be New Michigan or New California. Those places tried to stem their declines by marshaling taxation, regulation and future spending obligations in ways that left many employers thinking: Hmm. Expense and hassle. Plenty of other states would rather have these jobs.

Employers tend to be harder-headed in deciding where to invest their money than our lawmakers are in spending other people's money. The employers see Illinois pols dithering through a crisis, inviting an even more bleak future with their refusal to reform government spending and reduce what it costs to have a payroll in Illinois:

• You haven't heard Illinois leaders confront a November warning from advisers to the legislature's economic think tank — the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability — that while half the states would recover from their job losses by mid-2013, "Illinois would not recover its peak employment level until 2014 or 2015." In the meantime, " … 10 states, including Illinois, are expected to suffer unemployment rates in excess of 9 percent."

• Nor have you heard Illinois leaders, in their to and fro over an income tax hike, confront a 2009 report by the American Legislative Exchange Council: A decade's worth of hard data suggests that states with no individual income tax created 89 percent more jobs, and had 32 percent faster personal income growth, than did states with the highest income tax rates. The report also analyzed 15 policy factors that influence a state's growth prospects — tax burdens, debt service, tort climate, mandated minimum wage, spending limits if any — and ranked Illinois' economic outlook as an alarming 44th in the U.S.

• Nor have you heard Illinois leaders confront this state's devastating rank in job creation, 48th, and ask how they can be friendlier to present and potential employers. Illinois — with its overspending, its borrowing and its worst-in-America pension crisis — faces massive obligations that give potential employers pause. Add to this toxic mix Illinois' high cost of workers compensation and its 49th-in-the-U.S. bond ratings. How surprised, then, are we that since 1990 Illinois has underperformed the U.S. in job growth?



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Illinois needs a new paradigm.

Illinois needs leaders who unwind the terrible indebtedness that lawmakers past and present have bequeathed to taxpayers and their grandchildren.

Illinois needs an end to the mutual admiration society of public officials and public employees coddling one another.

Illinois needs fewer governments and, in Springfield, one government scared straight by so much lost employment.

Most of all, Illinois needs leaders who see that, across this nation, concerns about the public sector's size, cost and reach is the domestic issue that most rivets Americans.

We, like Illinois lawmakers frozen in delay and denial, hope recovery creates enough jobs to rescue struggling families and to fund crucial priorities. Unlike the pols, though, we're not content only to hope. We urge them not to flee Springfield until they've made spending and structural reforms to attract employers.

Above all, we expect voters exercised about education and other causes to elect lawmakers who'll end the Illinois spiral.


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