By David Stanczak
When I was a kid, our neighbors had a dog named Huey. It was really stupid. One day, to illustrate its stupidity to my brother, I pointed to Huey, who was watching us. The dog watched me toss a baseball glove, underhanded, in his direction. His eyes tracked the path of the glove, in a high arc, as it approached him. When it smacked the sidewalk about 2 feet in front of him, Huey jumped up, totally startled.
Over the weekend, we learned that the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the so-called pension reform legislation for running afoul of the Illinois Constitution. I can think of no one, other than Pollyanna (who didn’t even know what a pension was) who predicted a different result.
It would be unfair-a little-to characterize the reaction in Springfield as chaos, tumult, panic, pandemonium, and bedlam. But we heard all kinds of statements to the effect that the decision upset all the politicians’ fiscal plans for the state, especially the well-crafted budget for this fiscal year which provided funds for only half the year. You see, in addition to the assumption that the income tax increase which just came off would be put back on again, the budget also assumed that the Supreme Court would approve the “pension reform legislation”, thus justifying the reduced expenditure amounts it contained for pension contributions. There was really no reason for overreaction to that reaction. The Supreme Court decision merely meant that instead of being in really dire straits, Illinois was in really, really dire straits. It drove home the point increasingly intruding on our collective consciousness, that the time of game playing with the budget is over. The underfunding, the “pension holidays”, the skimping on pension contributions, the casual increasing of benefits, the criminally ignorant rosy projections of how much the pension funds would earn, are over. One reporter in the know predicted that the General Assembly would spend a lot of time this summer trying to iron it out.
So what’s the difference between Huey the dog and the politicians? Huey got over being startled much quicker.
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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