If you were the governor, where would you cut the state budget?
I ask the question because just about everyone I talk to believes Illinois overspends. And there’s no doubt the state is in terrible financial shape.
The state of the state is pitiful.
But whenever there’s talk of cuts, I get telephone calls from people begging me to come to their aid because any slashes in state spending’s means the services they depend on are going to be hurt.
I’m talking about services for the developmentally disabled, children and adults suffering from cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and other ailments that depend on work training programs to prepare them and for a productive and independent life.
Then there are the community programs to help the mentally ill. The state closed many of its institutions, including the one in Tinley Park, to save money and allegedly provide more efficient treatment for the mentally ill.
Well, the costs have been cut, but the jury is still out on whether those suffering from mental ailments are receiving better care.
State spending on programs for the mentally ill has ranked near the bottom of the nation for decades. So has its spending on programs for the developmentally disabled.
If you were king, or governor, would you say, “Tough luck! We’ve got to start cutting somewhere because Illinois is out of money.”
OK. Say you’re willing to make that hard, heartless choice.
What that means, what it has meant, is that Cook County Jail becomes the primary treatment center in Illinois for the mentally ill.
The cost to house and treat people for mental ailments in prison is nearly three times as great as it would be to provide those people with prescription drugs and medical care in their communities.
And that’s not including the cost of the crimes they commit (usually misdemeanors), the time police officers have to spend picking them up, the public cost of judges and lawyers.
Does that make sense?
Shelters for victims of domestic violence that house women and children who have been abused are another sector I hear from on a regular basis.
They depend on state aid to provide services to their clients and without it helpless people would be hurt, maybe even killed. Do you think state spending on such programs is a waste of money?
Public education is always a key target for those looking to cut costs.
But if you are looking to cut teacher salaries remember that, here in Illinois, property taxpayers pick up nearly 70 percent of the cost of their local schools. And in the suburbs, it’s local school boards, elected by homeowners, who set the pay scales for teachers.
The state of Illinois contributes less to the total cost of public education than any other state in the country.
The state does pick up a large portion of the pension costs for suburban teachers, but even if the Illinois Supreme Court upholds the recent pension reform law passed by the General Assembly (considered unlikely), it would have little impact on state spending in the short term.
The pension reform bill is a long-term fix aimed primarily at appeasing the bond rating agencies in the short term so the state can borrow more money at lower interest rates.
How about cutting the Department of Children and Family Services? Whenever a child is found abused or neglected in a home, the public responds with outrage after hearing the report on television or in the newspapers.
When the state fails to check up on children placed in foster homes and they disappear from the system, politicians and voters express their outrage and demand reform.
But we all know that DCFS is underfunded and understaffed.
You can scream all you want, but nothing’s likely to change without more money. You make cuts, it’s going to get worse.
Hey, someone is going to have to suffer, right?
Propose cuts in prisons, law enforcement and the courts and, well, we all know what’s going to happen.
The reform most likely to save money in all of those areas, the legalization of marijuana, isn’t likely to happen.
You could cut state aid to public transportation and public road programs, but that would result in more traffic jams on the expressways, more potholes and even higher costs down the road when the infrastructure collapses.
People always talk about cutting the salaries of state legislators, and I’m not going to oppose the idea here, but the fact is it wouldn’t save nearly enough money to help this state and, politically, it isn’t going to happen.
Hey, the new governor, the fellow who says we have to get tough on spending and refuses to take a salary for himself, just authorized $100,000 for his wife’s chief of staff. That’s political reality.
Everybody always talks about across-the-board cuts, zero-based budgeting, and all sorts of other gimmicks to cut government spending.
Illinois has actually cut government spending by billions in recent years, outsourcing many services. Yet it now struggles to pay the bills of those private vendors despite the cuts — causing some of them to go out of business and others to question doing business with the state.
People accuse me of being a liberal, of being too soft-hearted or soft-headed, because I mention this sort of thing during debates about state spending.
But I get calls from these people, volunteers, social service providers, families of the developmentally disabled or mentally ill, and I wonder how many of you could tell them, “Sorry, we really don’t care.”
“We need your help,” they say.
And I tell them I will do what I can, but the state is running out of money, taxpayers don’t trust the government and we have a new governor who has not been elected to increase spending.
Even if his plan to impose a sales tax on services passes the legislature, it’s not likely to replace all the money generated by the temporary state income tax increase that rolled back Jan. 1 ($2 billion this year, $4 billion next year).
Average folks prefer to think about all this stuff in terms of politics, Democrats vs. Republicans, big spenders vs. people who believe in living within a budget.
It’s rare that you hear ordinary people talk about what they would do with the elderly in nursing homes, children who are homeless, the mentally ill.
Cutting is easy. Living with the result, well, maybe that’s even easier.
