By David Stanczak
Have you ever asked yourself what The Chronicles of Narnia have to do with the State of Illinois budget problem? I thought not.
Every sentient person in the State of Illinois knows that the state is a fiscal mess. Stories about the mess are usually accompanied by hand-wringing and deploring of the state’s budget, or lack thereof. While this state of affairs is inconvenient to say the least, it should be viewed in a wider historical context. The State of Illinois did not get into the mess it is in from lack of agreement on budgets. Quite the contrary, we got here precisely because there was agreement on a whole host of budgets that were fiscally unsound. For years, the State of Illinois has lived with budgets which spent more than we had, kicked the financial can down the road, and were based on the assumption that,in the end, there was a limitless supply of money to fund it all.
But the fiscal can has been kicked into a cul-de-sac;after the last income tax increase, large numbers of taxpayers voted with their feet, resulting in an exodus from Illinois that rivaled the flood from East to West when the Berlin Wall came down; and the tax increase was so unpopular, the politicians didn’t have the guts not to allow it to expire. There is a consensus that we are on the wrong road.
C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, makes the following observation:
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
We don’t have agreement on a budget precisely because Governor Rauner hasn’t gone along with the super-majority of Democratic legislators, a majority so large that it could gerrymander the state at will, and did. He is the first governor since someone before Jim Thompson, for whom “Thompson’s Folly” was aptly named, who didn’t go along with the tax and spend and kick the can down the road program.
Agreement on a budget would be easy; all Rauner has to do is give in. But if he did, we would just continue our headlong rush down Lewis’s wrong road.
David Stanczak, a Forum commentator since 1995, came to Bloomington in 1971. He served as the City of Bloomington’s first full-time legal counsel for over 18 years, before entering private practice. He is currently employed by the Snyder Companies and continues to reside in Bloomington with his family.
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