•January 16, 2019•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I hate to play the skeleton at the feast, because Gov.-elect J. B. Pritzker has an apparently strong desire to do more and better for the state of Illinois. Yet, he must face the harsh realities of having inherited a fiscal system that is broke, deep in debt, bankrupt in the sense that Illinois cannot pay its bills in anything close to a timely fashion.
So, will the themes for his forthcoming state of the state and budget messages be akin to “Happy Days Are Here Again” or a somber “Blood, toil, tears and sweat”?
Here is snapshot of the situation he faces. For probably two decades now, Illinois state government has been running annual budget deficits of roughly $3 billion or more, on average, when unfunded future obligations and piled up unpaid bills are included.
The situation is so bad that in 2017, according to Reuters, the state paid out more than $1 billion (a 1 followed by 9 zeroes) to vendors in late payment penalty fees, a frittered-away billion dollars of taxpayer dollars that did not buy a solitary good or service!
The state’s credit cards are all maxed out. If Illinois continues to spend more than it takes in, while bills pile up, the folks at the bond rating agencies will begin to mutter “Puerto Rico” under their breath (P.R., the bankrupt semi-sovereign American commonwealth).
During his campaign, J.B., as he likes to be called, pledged to enact a progressive income tax (higher tax rates for higher incomes), a big infrastructure building program, and increased spending for education, higher education, and more. Read More

•January 9, 2019•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

A recent lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal contrasted the double-digit population growth in Florida and Texas over the past decade with the bottom-of-the-rung decline of almost 1 percent in Illinois.
Can Gov.-elect J. B. Pritzker reverse the population outflow and relative economic decline of our state, and how?
First, some context. The Illinois economy has been declining relative to the nation since shortly after World War II, and the net out-migration of our population, especially of whites, has been going on almost as long. In 1950, the Illinois per capita income stood at 130 percent of the national average (100 percent). Since then, our state has seen a slow but steady decline, to about 104 percent. We are still above average, but just a bit.
Years ago, I reviewed our state’s demographic mix and found that from 1970 to 2000, our state saw a net out-migration (more people leaving than coming in, net) of two million whites, many to the sunny climes, job opportunities and low taxes of the South and Southwest. This net outflow has continued, I’m confident. Read More

•January 2, 2019•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The Illinois Monument at the Kennesaw Mountain Civil War battlefield north of Atlanta is a rather nondescript vertical block of marble.
The monument stands atop Cheatham’s Hill, which the soldiers of the 85th and 125th Illinois Regiments almost but never quite reached on June 26, 1864. The marker commemorates the courage and cohesiveness of the men who came within 30 feet of the almost impregnable Confederate earthen parapets above the sharp rise.
Each holiday season I visit my sister’s family, who live near the park, outside Marietta, GA. And each year I am drawn back to Cheatham’s Hill.
I stand at the top of the hill, looking down from the dug earthen defenses, still evident. I wonder in awe how men could have marched in formation up the hill, sure to absorb a crippling fusillade from rifles stuck through the slits of space between the earth works and the braced logs atop.
The open, grassy line of march up the hill is the shape of a football field, though maybe half again as wide and deep. Loblolly pine frame the battlefield, tall, mute sentinels to the carnage of that day. The Union lost 397 killed and wounded at just this one hill, rather insignificant in the larger scheme of things. Read More

•December 19, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The Illinois Supreme Court has repeatedly thwarted citizen efforts to vote on term limits and redistricting reform, and has dismissed, without even a hearing on the merits, a proposal to address the public employee pension mess that is strangling the state budget.
This past week, the state high court approved an outrageous violation of taxpayer-funded pension programs by awarding huge pensions to non-government union officials who put in a single day on a government payroll. How shameful this practice.
I say if the court won’t change its ways, change the court. Read on, though the next several paragraphs might be a slog.
The framers of the Illinois Constitution of 1970 provided that voters could initiate and amend the legislative article of the charter. “Structural and procedural” amendments would be allowed. In 1976, the court held that this term requires amendments be both structural and procedural. This makes it almost impossible to craft a proposal to make a single change in the legislative article that is both.
The late, eminent state Supreme Court justice Walter Schaefer pooh-poohed this court reading. “When I see that a restaurant serves both chicken and beef, that doesn’t mean every dish has to have both chicken and beef in it!” Read More

•December 12, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Gov.-elect J. B. Pritzker has begun the typical minuet of transition to office in January, creating committees to look, respectively, at how he can improve education, infrastructure, social services, whathaveyou.
I have been a part of three gubernatorial transitions over past decades, and headed one (and was just now, while writing this, invited to serve on a Pritzker committee, which I accepted).
Large committees of insiders and outsiders to government will sit around conference tables and offer prescriptions for saving our state. The well-meaning committee members may help educate the incoming governor, who in J. B.’s case came to his candidacy with little background in Illinois state government.
Most prescriptions will require more money, lots of it. There will be projections that much money can be saved in the future, if only we spend lots more now to address problems, e.g. prisoner recidivism, gang violence, abused children, poorly educated children and more. And they may be right.
Yet there is really only one “committee” that matters, and it is a committee of a solitary person—the incoming director of the state budget. Read More