“I’m Heading For Florida”

“I’m heading for Florida soon as I graduate,” declared the bright looking college senior,  adding, “the taxes are too high here and there aren’t any jobs in Illinois.” Other students near him  nodded silently. 

The comment came in a recent class on state government at Illinois State University where I lectured. 

The next day I was standing in line at a funeral visitation, and the farmer next to me was  telling another about his vacation in Florida. “When people saw my Illinois plates,” he  recounted, “they laughed and joked about the problems we have back home.” 

When I was a boy growing up in small-town Illinois in the 1950s, life was good, and  getting better. Crops on the farms outside town were growing in size each year. I saw trucks go  through town loaded with hogs or cattle, headed for the sprawling Chicago Union Stock Yards,  then to be shaped into bacon and steaks by the great meat-packers in the city. 

Chicago was far distant, yet I knew the city was big enough to host my favorite baseball  and football teams. And I had seen pictures of the city’s factories, belching smoke, steel and the  appliances that my parents were becoming prosperous enough to buy.  

My state was Illinois, and I was proud to be from it. 

What has changed? Can we return to the good ol’ days? 

Whites have been leaving our state for warmer climes for decades. Population growth in  our state has been anemic, any growth coming from increases in Hispanic, primarily Mexican,  population.

In the past decade, Illinois spent about $5 billion more a year on average than we took in  from revenues, on a $60 billion budget. And we underfunded our public employee pension  system by about $2 billion a year on average for the past decade. 

So taxes went up in 2011, and the typical household now pays about $1,000 more a year  in state taxes, which for the first time puts us above the national average for state and local taxes  as a percentage of gross state product. 

And according to one national public opinion survey, Illinois is the second most disliked  state in the nation, after California.  

That is, significantly more people across the country have negative thoughts about  Illinois than favorable ones, whereas most states in the survey received more favorable than  negative thoughts from those surveyed. 

Yet Illinois still has the strengths that made us great. Most states would be envious to  have what Illinois has. We have prime location in the center of the country, and most markets are  but a day away on our unparalleled infrastructure of interstates, rail, air and water. Most parts of  Illinois have plenty of underground or surface water.  

And in Chicago we have a leading global metropolitan region. Our system of higher  education has been strong, we have much higher than average rates of college degrees among our  population than other states, and the state is above average in wealth. 

But we have to pull ourselves out of our financial hole and also show the world that  going forward we plan to reject corruption.  

This can only be done, on the matter of finances, by sensible policies. Unfortunately, we  cannot significantly reduce our tax load until we have paid off our overdue bills and established a  plan to rebuild our pension funds. 

We have already been cutting education and university funding, so there is not much  room there for further cuts. On pensions, both current employees and retirees like me will have  to take some hits, in pension retirement age and payouts for current employees and in health care  premiums for retirees.  

Healthcare is the biggest cost of state government. Here, we must try new approaches to  cost containment, where we have not been successful in the past. (I will have a separate column  on this topic soon.) 

The matter of corruption may be the tougher challenge. Too many of us are inured with  the sense that government is a place to do well while maybe doing good. 

All of the above requires both leadership—and followers—and time. The upcoming  gubernatorial campaign will be a test for both candidates and voters. 

If candidates try to bamboozle voters with simple, easy solutions and plans, and voters  respond to such folderol, Illinois will continue to decline.  

If candidates take the high road and convince voters that change is possible, maybe the  student headed for Florida will rethink his decision.