•July 26, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

This past week, Gov. Bruce Rauner stunned observers when he unceremoniously booted his veteran top staff out the door and turned management of state government over to an inexperienced team of policy wonks from the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI).

The IPI is a decade-old, very conservative advocacy group; nothing wrong with that, of course.

Yet it’s about time the IPI was called out for its hard-edged promotion of great sounding but wholly impracticable proposals, which is to my mind harmful to the policymaking process.

The IPI was started a decade ago by John Tillman, an entrepreneurial builder of non-profit advocacy organizations. Tillman raises $3+ million a year in funding from old money conservatives like the Koch Brothers as well as from successful Chicago business folks like Bruce Rauner.

True believer ideologue and IPI president Kristina Rasmussen is as of this past week Rauner’s new chief of staff. And top policy and management slots are also now filled with a half dozen young IPI folks. From my knowledge of several IPI staff, they are smart, lacking in government experience, and highly ideological. Read More

•July 12, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Retired politics professor Ken Redfield and I sat in the cafeteria of a gray, Soviet-style 1950s state office building in Springfield this past week to ruminate about a book we are doing on Illinois over the past half-century.

We are intrigued by the idea that our state’s post-2000 dysfunction may have been prefigured over the decades by a mix of economic, institutional and political changes.

As thinkers from Seneca in ancient Rome to A. Lincoln have observed, “All that’s past is prologue.”

Why the past half century? We enacted a new state constitution in 1970. Modernizing governor Richard Ogilvie came into office in 1969, enacting the income tax and expanding state government. State economic decline relative to the nation accelerated about then, as shrinkage in our rich manufacturing jobs base began to show. And significant net out-migration of whites became evident.

So why might events and change over the period have shaped the present dysfunction? Read More

Some Things Haven’t Changed

The state’s problems are beyond party. We don’t live 25 years ago, either. This is 2017, and there is bipartisan consensus on a state budget today. The Governor simply stands in the way of any budget becoming law.

Governor Rauner is constitutionally mandated to submit a balanced budget each year. He never once has. The State House and State Senate are the only elected bodies trying to pass a budget and actually deal with our state’s budget crisis. Any budget deal must be able to overcome a Rauner veto, as he demands to get 100% of what he wants. He actually doesn’t want a budget deal because he wants to use this issue in next year’s gubernatorial election. Read More

•June 21, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The best things in live are generally not free. Take health care.

When I was a boy in the 1940-50s, each small town had two or three family doctors. The hospital in the nearby city of 20,000 (13,000 today) was a small, quiet affair where you went until you got well, or died.

There was no Medicare or Medicaid. Nor much insurance. I recall coming home about third grade with a flyer for my parents about how a new company called Blue Cross-Blue Shield was offering a policy to cover me for a dollar a month. Those were simpler times.

Today my friends and I are “doctorin’” all the time, with many specialists. Construction cranes are frequently seen hovering around the latest health complex addition. Hospitals are generally the biggest employers in town.

The advances in health care are coming at us in a blinding cavalcade of change, with our individual DNA the focus of the newest therapies. Read More

•June 21, 2017•

By Jerry L. Ginther
NP Columnist

Like many my age, you may remember hearing our elders speak of how things were prior to and during WWII. Stories of The Great Depression, WWII and the Korean War that followed were often topics I heard discussed as a youngster. Their memories were fresh and vivid. We were shown pictures of uncles and cousins who served, some of whom we never knew because they died in military service before we were born. Such were my experiences as well as occasionally being fortunate enough to hear an actual account from one who served and survived the ordeal.

Most of those accounts were interesting, but I would learn later in life that I never really understood the gravity of war or the pain of the accounts being shared. They were just stories with no reality for comparison in my primary school years.

As I grew into my preteen years, learned American and World History in school, those stories began to take on meaning that I could understand.

Seeing the accounts, dates and figures in text books established facts that made me aware that the whole world had suffered through what I thought were just stories that affected my family and community. It was then that I began to see those accounts in a more realistic perspective. I began to ask more questions of my grandparents, uncles, older cousins and siblings to refresh me on those stories that had not meant much to me as a child. I wanted to hear those stories and see those pictures again. Suddenly, all of those veterans were heroes that I wanted to know more about. Read More