As mentioned in the post below, Karen May held a series of town hall meetings today to seek ideas for handling tough financial times. I attended the morning meeting in Deerfield.
May began by reporting on the success of her health care co-op bill. I restrained myself from asking about single payer, like they're working on in Vermont. Illinois will never be the leader on this one and we'll likely lose businesses to the states that are.
May also gave us literature about several pending bills relating to the state budget. House Bill 1512 which creates the commission on Taxpayer Oversight and Reduction of State Spending. The Commission is supposed to review the budget and investigate spending reduction investigations. House Resolution 158 requires funds not appropriated in the 2012 budged be used to pay down the backlog of unpaid bills. That would be nice if there were going to be any freed up funds. This resolution is supposed to operate with House Resolution 110 which sent a spending ceiling based on poor economic projections. It seems to me that, working together, these provisions are only as good as the economic growth we can create to increase revenues over the lowball expectation, and you don't create growth with cuts.
As usual, pensions were discussed. May brought up that we cannot lump all pensions together. Most of the state emplyees we think about such as teachers, janitors and firefighters do not make large pensions. She's working on fixing pensions abuse such as pensions received by part time board members. She further reminded attendees that the Illinois Constitution (Article 13 Section 5) is clear that pension benefits may not be diminished, so without an amendment, some of the legislation called for by people will not withstand a constitutional challenge in court. May described that Article 13 was included in the 1970 IL Constitution because during good times the funds were often wrongly diverted to other uses.
May talked about Illinois high retirement age for pensioneers. It's 67, the highest in the country. I wonder how effective that is for teachers, police and fire where the workers don't tend to stay until they reach that age in any event.
It was refreshing to see people in the audience who understand that revenue is an important part of any budget discussion. One man brought up the old WWII luxury tax. A few people wondered why we cannot change Illinois' regressive tax structure.
May brought up an important point, that we're not really talking about that much money. For all the hand wringing in the media (my words, not Mays) about deficits and cuts, the fungible part of the budget is about the size of a rounding error. Half of the budget will never be cut because that will reduce what we get in federal matching and reducing it becomes counterproductive. A little less than 1/3 of the budget goes to each of education and Medicare. Medicare cuts are in the works already in the form of increased restrictions on eligibility.
A friend of mine who attended the meeting with me pointed out that we were talking about numbers we haven't reviewed. May pointed out that we can look at the budget online. It can be found here.
One education cut that May will support is the stop hold harmless. Districts get money for individual student attendance. Shrinking districts are held harmelss from some loss of this funding. May thinks that may be unfair.
Also brought up by audience members were progressive possibilities such as service taxes, better enforcement of the sales tax, misdemeanor violation fees in lieu of jail time.
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