It’s this simple: Illinois’ elected officials must earn the trust of the voters.
Forbes post, “Whatever Happened To Illinois’ Plan To Fund Pensions With Asset Sales? Not Much, It Turns Out.”
Originally published at Forbes.com on October 29, 2020.
It was going on two years ago, back in February of 2019, that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office announced the creation of two task forces to improve Illinois’ chronic pension underfunding. The first of these led to a report in October, that is, a year ago, proposing the consolidation of the asset management of Illinois’ police and fire pensions, which are managed by local municipalities rather than on a statewide basis, and very quickly thereafter, in November, to legislation accomplishing the proposal.
The second of these task forces, the Pension Asset Value and Transfer Taskforce, was intended, as described in the governor’s press release, “to analyze state assets across Illinois and make recommendations as to their best use to help stabilize the state’s finances. Recommendations could include, but are not limited to, the repurposing or sale of these assets or transfer to state pension systems to improve their levels of funding.” At the time, selling the Illinois Tollway was speculated to be a possibility, with the proceeds plowed into pension plans. Other observers speculated that the state could be playing financial games by transferring currently valued at “book value” into a fund where they’d be valued at “market value,” instantly conjuring up money!
And then . . . nothing.
Or, rather, nothing visible to the public.
According to (heavily-redacted) materials recently provided to me through a Freedom of Information Act request, the task force did indeed meet regularly in the months after its formation.
In April, the governor’s office claimed that their recommendations would be coming in July.
In May, reports were said to be coming “in the coming months,” with the expectation that the end result would be a “long-term pension reform plan.”
In September, the governor’s staff circulated among themselves a draft version of an Asset Transfer report. (I was unable to inspect the report itself.)
In October, that is, almost exactly a year ago, the office told an inquiring reporter that the task force was “still working on their recommendations and should be ready to present them soon.”
Finally, in November 2019, in response to a reporter, the staff said, “the chairs of the taskforce thought it would be helpful to have municipal representation at the table during discussions.”
And here the trail ends. There’s no explicable reason why a task force meant solely to identify whether the state could shore up the funding level of its public pensions via asset transfers, would involve city governments, especially when the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund (all employees of Illinois cities except fire, police, and the city of Chicago) is nearly fully-funded. Had the scope of the task force been expanded to a point where local municipalities’ participation had truly seemed relevant? It was, after all, at about this time, again, a year ago, when Chicago’s Mayor Lightfoot had been calling for a “statewide pension reform package” — with, of course, no further specifics. Did this hypothetical broadened scope become unmanageable?
Were there indeed assets identified — but then squabbles about how any funds should be allocated? Or, what’s most likely, did they conclude that, other than the planned sale of the Thompson Center, the proceeds of which are unknown but earmarked for pensions, there’s just not a lot of extra cash to be scrounged up from the state’s metaphorical couch cushions? And, having concluded that, did they prefer to let the task force die a quiet death, eventually forgotten about, rather than issue a report which would disappoint its readers and embarrass those who promised solutions? It should be noted that I, likewise, asked the governor’s press office for an update but received no reply.
The bottom line is, of course, that, even prior to the arrival of COVID-19, there was no easy path towards states conjuring well-funded pension plans into existence without simply contributing the necessary funds to those plans.
December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.
Forbes post, “Pension Failures, Governance Failures – Illinois Once Again Is The Poster Child”
Originally published at Forbes.com on October 5, 2020.
Longtime readers with particularly good memories may recall my first actuary-splainer: “Why Public Pension Pre-Funding Matters.” Knowing that many public pensions have had a long legacy of unfunding, and that the elected officials in charge of those plans have been plenty happy to operate them as, effectively, pay-as-you-go plans, I explained why this is actually a very bad idea indeed.
As a refresher, failure to fund pensions as they are earned traps future generations with legacy costs they may be unable to pay, if the size of the economy or the population shrinks. (You might think that won’t happen, but it has.) Even if those future generations are able to pay, it’s still unfair to expect them to pay off a prior generation’s debts, rolling over debt to their own children, and only implementing an alternate form of benefit (such as a defined contribution plan or even a shift to participating in Social Security) at great cost. It enables a mindset of promising pensions without paying any regard to their affordability for those future generations. (Again, it’s happened over and over again.) And funding failures go hand-in-hand with governance failures, which are both a cause and a consequence of the former: un- or under-funded pensions inspire gaming the system (passing the costs on to someone else, finding loopholes and tricks to avoid the reality of the debt) and, yes, tend to be a part of a general culture of faulty governance, if not outright corruption.
Can I prove that there is a direct connection between underfunded pensions and corruption? Admittedly not easily — for starters because there is no universally agreed-upon measure of corruption. In 2015, Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight produced rankings based on several metrics, among them the results of a survey of state political reporters. Pairing this survey with the most recent summary of pension funding status by state produces a correlation coefficient of .34. Eliminate New York (where its courts have mandated pension funding) and the correlation rises to .39. (Note that this excludes purely local plans such as Chicago’s pensions.) It’s not a slam-dunk, as this falls in the “weak-to-moderate” relationship level, but, at the same time, this doesn’t take into account the various ways in which a state can be poorly governed without violating anti-corruption laws. Separately, pairing up pension funding levels with U.S. News’ Best States Ranking submetric of Fiscal Stability produces a correlation of .62, though that speaks more to the end result than the route our elected officials take to get there.
But I raise this, again, because Illinois is up to its old tricks, again.
Here are three news items:
First, as reported by Wirepoints, Moody’s is pushing back on proposals to re-amortize pensions.
“Moody’s Investors Service has issued its next warning to Illinois, noting pension debts are overwhelming the state’s economy and will continue to do so over the next year. Moody’s also cautioned against any ideas of improperly funding pensions as a way of providing relief for the state’s worsening budget. The agency said any ‘reamortization’ of pension debts would be credit negative. Moody’s rates Illinois just one notch above junk with a negative outlook. . . .
“The rating agency also quashed the hopes of some Illinois activists who continue to pursue debt ‘reamortization’ as a way to kick the can. Reamortization of Illinois’ pension debt would push repayments further into the future, weakening the pension funds even more. Moody’s added, ‘…any cuts to its pension contributions would only worsen [the state’s] long-term fiscal position by adding to its unfunded liabilities…Relying heavily on strategies like deficit borrowing or “re-amortizing” its pension contribution schedule would however be credit negative for the state, since such tactics only add to a long-term cycle of borrowing, or deferring payment, to address the consequences of those past actions.’”
Who’s pushing to re-amortize pensions? The Illinois Municipal League has called for this, for one, back in August, as has the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, for multiple years, with a pension bond proposal which, in the fine print, reduces the funding target in 2045 from 90% to 70%. How tempted is Pritzker by these promises of an easy fix? He had proposed to stretch out the 90% funding target from 2045 to 2052, back in 2019, then backed away and has been silent on the subject since, but one presumes Moody’s feels there is a real risk, in order to find it necessary to warn against it.
Second, having rejected pension reform, the governor is putting all his eggs in the the so-called “Fair Tax” basket, threatening “nightmare” cuts or tax hikes if voters don’t approve it, and, what’s more, he and other supporters are engaging in misleading claims in order to gain voter support. What’s more, it turns out that the misleading claims have found their way not only to advertisements and politicans’ mouths, but to the actual ballot itself.
As context, Illinois’s state constitution prohibits a graduated income tax, prohibits more than one income tax, and keys the corporate tax rate off the personal income tax in an 8:5 ratio. The proposed tax amendment, which he and other supporters are calling a “fair tax,” would change each of those, allowing unlimited brackets, allowing multiple taxes (for instance, making the first-time implementation of a tax on retirement income more acceptable by using lower rates), and keying the maximum corporate tax rate off the highest tax bracket. In the tax structure which would come into effect in 2021 if the amendment passes, due to existing legislation, corporate would jump to the highest in the nation.
However, the ballot itself does not contain the actual amendment. Instead, it contains an “explanation” of the amendment, as prepared by its supporters, as follows:
“The proposed amendment grants the State authority to impose higher income tax rates on higher income levels, which is how the federal government and a majority of other states do it. The amendment would remove the portion of the Revenue Article of the Illinois Constitutions that is sometimes referred to as the ‘flat tax,’ that requires all taxes on income to be at the same rate. The amendment does not itself change tax rates. It gives the State ability to impose higher rates on those with higher income levels and lower income tax rates on those with middle or lower income levels. You are asked to decide whether the proposed amendment should become part of the Illinois Constitution.”
As Wirepoints observes, there are multiple untruths, half-truths, and omissions in this description.
First, to “impose higher income tax rates on higher income levels” is in fact not “how the federal government and a majority of others states do it.” Of those states with graduated income tax rates, only 15 have rates and brackets that single out “higher income” taxpayers; the remainder have highest-marginal-rates that start at middle-class incomes, or even lower levels. Of course, it is literally true that $50,000 is a “higher income” than $20,000, but “higher income levels” is commonly understood in an absolute sense, not simply relative to someone who hears less.
Second, the explanation likewise promises that the higher tax rates will fall on “higher income levels” and that “those with middle or lower income levels” will have lower tax rates. But there is nothing in the amendment that ensures that middle-income taxpayers will have a lower marginal tax rate than upper-income folk.
Third, the amendment’s explanation omits the removal of the “only one tax” provision as well as the keying of the corporate tax rate off the highest tax bracket.
In fact, as it happens, just today the Illinois Policy Institute filed a lawsuit asking for a Corrective Notice to be included in ballots to remove the misleading language. Will they succeed? Illinois being Illinois, I have my doubts, but their concerns are justified.
Finally, Illinois is in the midst of yet another corruption scandal.
In this case, it’s a matter of bribery.
This past July, the Chicago Tribune reported,
“A federal investigation orbiting the political operation of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan drew much closer to the powerful politician Friday, as prosecutors unveiled a criminal complaint charging ComEd in a “years-long bribery scheme” involving jobs, contracts and payments to Madigan allies.
“Prosecutors said the utility attempted to “influence and reward” Madigan by providing financial benefits to some close to him, often through a key confidant and adviser at the center of the probe. Madigan, the nation’s longest-serving speaker and Illinois Democratic Party chairman, has not been charged with any wrongdoing.”
Already the company has agreed to a $200 million fine.
Then, last week, the Tribune reported that former ComEd executive Fidel Marquez has pled guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors.
“The fact that Marquez is now also working with investigators significantly ramps up the pressure against others who have been implicated — but not yet charged — in the scheme, including former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore; lobbyist and former ComEd executive John T. Hooker; Jay Doherty, a consultant and former President of the City Club; and Michael McClain, a former lobbyist for the utility and one of Madigan’s closest confidants.”
But as far as Illinois politics are concerned, it’s (mostly) business as usual. There is no interest among House Democrats in investigating Madigan’s conduct, and the attempt by minority House Republicans to do so has been met by roadblocks; not only has Madigan refused to testify but other leaders in the House are not confronting him. There are small encouraging signs — for instance, Gov. Pritzker has actually called for Madigan to testify, and Democratic state Rep. Stephanie Kifowit of exurban Oswego has announced she will challenge Madigan for speaker in January.
(For a history of Madigan’s connection to corruption, see the Tribune’s “House Speaker Michael Madigan says it’s not ‘ethically improper’ to find government jobs for people. Here’s what he’s failing to mention.” It’s a long article, detailing his legacy of patronage jobs and as the “rainmaker-in-chief” at a property tax appeals law firm.)
Patronage, bribery, deceit in ballot amendments, and a legacy of pension underfunding and trickery — it’s all part and parcel of a mindset that goes back to Mike Royko’s proposed new motto for city of Chicago: rather than Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden), it should be Ubi Est Mea (Where’s Mine). Of course, Royko proposed that decades ago, but Illinois is far from leaving that mindset behind.
Update:
Here is Mike Royko, writing in 1967:
“The old [motto] is Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden).
“The invention of the concrete mixer has made the old motto meaningless.
“The new motto — Ubi Est Mea? — means ‘Where’s Mine?’
“The phrase ‘Where’s Mine?’ can be heard wherever improvements for the city are being planned.
“It is the watchword of the new Chicago, the cry of the money brigade, the chant of the city of the big wallet.”
Folks, the wallet might not be as big any longer, but the expectations remain.
December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.
Contact Tracing is an Urgent Task. So Why Is the State Failing at It?
Back a month ago, I wrote a commentary in the Chicago Tribune in which I criticized the governor’s complete lack of communication (and seeming lack of plans) regarding contact tracing, despite the mandate that to move to Phase 3 contact tracing must be implemented, and to move to Phase 4, contact tracing must be fully scaled-up (90% of new diagnoses).
In the meantime, the governor has shifted to statements that contact tracing is already underway at local Departments of Public Health, and has shifted to speaking of a 60% objective (e.g., on May 18 and May 29) as well as a doublespeak rewriting of objectives as reaching 90% of the 60% target (I can no longer find this cite), and relabeling the entire project as “‘a goal’ rather than a requirement” (according to a May 26 Tribune report). However, the Restore Illinois official requirement remains unchanged.
I’ve become resigned to the fact that this is how politics works, that rather than announcing a change that involves an admission of failure and invites demands for other changes, it’s simply memory-holed. And my anger has shifted from the lack of communication to the lack of urgency in the actions of the governor, the mayor, and the Cook County Board President.
With respect to the last of these, an article on June 11 at the Chicago Tribune was the first reporting on the Cook County Department of Public Health’s actions — even when I looked just a few days prior there was no information available on the DPH website; now, the website announces that
CCDPH anticipates starting our first group of contact tracers by early August. Contact tracers will be brought on in groups of 50-100. CCDPH will have a full team by the fall.
Again, remember that this is supposed to be in place in order to move to Phase 4, which is otherwise being targeted for just two weeks from now.
Why is this taking so long?
In part, it appears to be the fault of the Illinois Department of Public Health taking nearly three months to allocate funding from the CARES Act, which passed in March. But it appears, from the Tribune reporting of Preckwinkle’s statements, that the delay is because the county simply does not recognize the urgency of getting the program in place as soon as possible, and is instead using the program to promote social justice objectives even at the cost of delayed implementation.
Preckwinkle said the efforts, funded with a grant from the Illinois Department of Public Health, would focus extensively on disproportionately affected groups that have “experienced systemic racism,” including African Americans and Latinos, both in terms of tracing and hiring of new contact tracers. The program also will be bilingual so hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking residents are not left out.
“This grant is so important for those who have been most impacted by COVID-19,” said Dr. Kiran Joshi, one of two senior medical officers running the county Department of Public Health, who said blacks in the county have been affected at three times the rate of whites and Latinos at four times the rate. “We intend to hire suburban Cook County residents for these jobs who are culturally competent, multilingual and have great communication skills.”
The county, however, will take several months to ramp up the program, even though many social-distancing restrictions have been lifted by the state and there’s concern that a future surge could occur soon because of recent crowded conditions during protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
Now, I well understand the importance of hiring tracers who can gain the trust of the tracees, because a program in which individuals are contacted but refuse assistance to enable them to isolate and refuse to provide information about their contacts because they don’t trust the tracer and can’t be persuaded that the greater good of their community warrants these actions, is fairly useless. But Preckwinkle’s statement goes beyond this acknowledgement to a desire to use the program to advance broader social goals. And that’s wrong — the top priority should be speed, regardless of whether goals of equal opportunity or extra assistance to underrepresented groups must be sacrificed.
In fact, like it or not, it is likely that a focus should be on disproportionately less affected communities, as the low-hanging fruit, with far more payoff in terms of the effectiveness of the effort. It seems to me even more the case state-wide, that nipping in the bud an incipient outbreak in a community that’s otherwise been uneffected would be more successful than the greater challenge of dense urban areas with a pre-existing substantial prevalence.
And it’s not just suburban Cook County — in Chicago itself, the process of hiring contact tracers is set to take much longer than it should, due to a process of first identifying an organization with which to contract out the primary organization of the effort, and then distributing funds to
at least 30 neighborhood-based organizations located within, or primarily serving residents of, communities of high economic hardship
which would work at
recruiting, hiring and supporting a workforce of 600 contact tracers, supervisors and referral coordinators to support an operation that has the capacity to trace 4,500 new contacts per day
with an objective of hiring 150 by August 1, and 300 by September 15.
And, again, quite apart from the appropriateness of prioritizing workers from low-income communities for city jobs, in general, contact tracing is not just a city jobs program. It is an urgent task. The work of hiring tracers should have been started months ago, not months in the future.
What’s more, even this plan is being criticized by Chicago activists, who want the hiring to be done within the Chicago Department of Public Health itself, rather than being outsourced, and who are treating this as a matter of shoring up governmental institutions.
Also joining the group were current and former union officials who have an interest in seeing the ranks of public workers expand. They included Tony Johnston, president of the Cook County College Teachers Union, who said city community colleges should be training new contact tracers, and Matt Brandon, former secretary-treasurer of International Service Employees Union Local 73 and current president of Communities Organized to Win.
Contact tracing is not a jobs program. It is not a stimulus program. It is not an economic rebuilding program for poor communities. It is certainly not a program for building up a unionized workforce. And city, county, and state government officials who treat it as such, rather than ramping up tracing as quickly as possible, during this limited window of opportunity of lowered infection rates due to lockdowns and warmer weather, are failing the people they serve.
Has Pritzker Abandoned Contact Tracing as a “Restore Illinois” Requirement?
It’s right there in black and white: contact tracing is a key part of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s “Restore Illinois” plan. To move from Phase 2 to Phase 3, permitting the opening of child care, retail, and gatherings of 10 or fewer people, requires the beginnings of “contact tracing and monitoring within 24 hours of diagnosis.” To move from Phase 3 to Phase 4, permitting the opening of restaurants, personal care services, health clubs, and schools, as well as gatherings of 50 or fewer people, requires fully scaled-up contract tracing, that is, “for more than 90% of cases in region.”
But as I wrote last Saturday at the Chicago Tribune, however crucial contact tracing is, the state has provided virtually no information on its timing or its progress in implementing the program.
Only just today did the Department of Public Health provide a press release on the topic (can I take credit for this?), informing residents that county public health departments will actually be running the initiative, with funding and technical support from the state, and with Partners in Health in an advisory role. Two specific counties will be “immediately” piloting the program. The governor further stated at today’s (Monday’s) press briefing that at present 29% of diagnoses are “engaged in a tracing process” and “that’s a number we want to push as high as possible, to the industry standard of over 60%.”
Despite this, last week Pritzker announced that “all regions across the state are now on track to meet the metrics needed to move into the next phase of reopening.”
How does this make sense? With only 11 days until the first possible “Phase 3” date, and with only a 2-county pilot program in place, how can the state be on track to meet its Phase 3 contact tracing requirement?
And how does a verbal target of aiming for “the industry standard of 60%” match up with the Phase 4 requirement of 90%?
What’s more, the state provides regular updates to metrics in the areas of testing and hospital admissions and resources, but no updates on contact tracing.
It’s as if they’ve forgotten about these requirements.
Has the state abandoned them, that is, continuing to strive for additional capacity but no longer requiring implementation/scaling to move to the next phase?
And, if so, why is the state not revising its plan, but instead simply treating them as if they don’t exist?
My guess: the governor knows there is tremendous pressure to revise other components of the plan: the inclusion of very geographically distinct counties adjacent to “collar counties” in the same region as Chicago, the continued closure of restaurants until Phase 4, the limitation on gatherings to 50 persons regardless of the capacity of a given facility, and so on. Were he to revise the contact tracing component, he would further increase calls for revisions of other sorts. So long as no one with any particularly strong voice or much political power calls him on this, he continues to be enabled to insist that his plan is unchangeable, set in stone, rather than risking opening it up to the sort of negotiation which he insists is impossible because he is guided solely by “science” and “data”.
Now, this is an admittedly cynical answer, but I can’t make sense of this any other way. And, much as I hate for it to be true, as it implicates a wide range of bureaucrats as well in this convenient omission, it does, at the same time, offer some firmer reason to believe that, however painfully delayed Phases 3 and 4 are implemented, however many restaurants and other small business will shut down, it will at least not be delayed even further.
Will the “Restore Illinois” plan actually, well, restore Illinois? I don’t have much hope.
Readers on other platforms will know that I have been sewing facemasks. My current count is 120 given away; I have a further 20 that are waiting for homes, plus, of course, the ones for our family. I’d been saying, “it makes me feel useful,” especially knowing that my writing at Forbes on retirement isn’t catching many eyes when it’s a stretch to tie things to the pandemic. But I realize that I had been treating it as something of a magical act: if I sew face masks, then things will work out OK.
In the meantime, the CDC’s initial insistence that face masks had no use, and failure to explain themselves sufficiently since then, has now resulted in far too many people rejecting face masks (“the CDC said there’s no point, so clearly the requirement now is just government overreach”). And at the same time, when I go to the store, I see lots of people with manufactured disposable face masks of the sort that we’re told are “reserved for healthcare workers.” The city is sponsoring giveaways — again of disposable masks; another group has sourced fabric masks out of Vietnam. It all leads me to question the utility of the masks I’ve been sewing.
Separately, the other day, in response to a lawsuit, Pritzker added “gathering for religious observance in groups of less than 10” to the list of permitted activities in the state of Illinois. And the neighboring diocese, in fact, permits coming to church for silent prayer; in the Archdiocese of Chicago, everything is shut down tightly, with no indicator that this will change, only a vaguely-worded statement that the archdiocese is “engaged in planning” on the matter.
And now Pritzker has released his “Restore Illinois” plan. I’m not happy. More specifically, it’s so discouraging I feel as if I’ve wasted my time battling the broken threads and birds’ nests of my 60s-era sewing machine, that only a move out-of-state would actually solve anything.
On the one hand, the plan is to be based on regional benchmarks. That’s a plus, I suppose, but my suburban town is lumped in with the city, so it doesn’t help me.
Here are the phases:
Right now, we are in “Phase 2” — a retroactive description of the governor’s changes to his stay-at-home order, with small loosenings of restrictions (curbside pickup rather than complete closure for non-essential stores).
Phase 3 would permit the reopening of “non-essential” businesses and manufacturing; retailers may open with capacity limits; barbershops/salons may open with restrictions; health and fitness clubs can provide outdoor classes. Healthcare providers may also re-open. Heavy, heavy restrictions remain including no gatherings of more than 10, no schools. “Limited child care and summer programs open with IDPH approved safety guidance” — and no further explanation about what this might mean. (Currently there are daycares open for essential workers — would these need-based restrictions remain? Or would the requirements be so stringent that it would effectively result in providers declaring they can’t meet them?) Some elements that I had hoped would be a part of a next-phase, such as outdoor dining, are not here. And a limit of 10 persons is unnecessarily restrictive in cases such as, for example, religious services in buildings large enough to accommodate more than that with wide spacing between individuals or family groups.
In order to declare Illinois (or a region thereof) in Phase 3, the state will require:
- Less than a 20% positivity rate (that is, percent of tests which are positive),
- No increases in admissions for 28 days,
- Available capacity of 14% of ICU beds, hospital beds generally, and ventilators,
- Testing widely available,
- and the implementation of contact tracing procedures (I think – that’s how I interpret “begin contact tracing and monitoring within 24 hours of diagnosis”).
The measurement starts as of May 1, so that the earliest a region can be declared in Phase 3 is May 29, even though, for all but the Northeast (Chicagoland) region, the benchmarks could well be met sooner but for that seemingly-arbitrary requirement, according to a tracking document which the state, it seems, intends to update regularly. And how long would Phase 3 last? The two additional requirements to move to Phase 4 are for testing to be available to all, regardless of risk factors or symptoms, and “begin contact tracing and monitoring within 24 hours of diagnosis for more than 90% of cases in region” — which I why I’m understanding the Phase 3 requirement to be more about contact tracing being underway.
But what would the timeline look like for contact tracing? According to The Southern, the initiative “likely won’t begin in earnest until sometime in late May.” How long would it take to reach this 90% benchmark? I’m not finding anything further on timing in the scanty reports on the initiative, not even speculation of how long it could last, but knowing bureaucracy, this seems a monumental hurdle. (Massachusett’s program is referred to as a model; their program has been running for a month and includes 17,000 people, including infected people and their contacts, relative to 70,271 positive tests so far.) Even discarding my skepticism, how long do Pritzker and his advisors actually have in mind when they set this marker for the transition to Phase 4?
Phase 4 removes many restrictions but keeps many more. Schools are open, all outdoor recreation allowed, bars and restaurants are open, etc. However, crucially, there continue to be capacity limits on theaters, restaurants, and retail, and no gatherings of over 50 people are permitted.
And Phase 5? To permit gatherings of over 50 will require that
Either a vaccine is developed to prevent additional spread of COVID-19, a treatment option is readily available that ensures health care capacity is no longer a concern, or there are no new cases over a sustained period.
Separately, the document indicates that the last condition may be met through “herd immunity or other factors” and that the treatment must be “effective and widely available” so as to suggest that the demand goes well beyond the moderate effects of the new drugs or ventilator-avoiding methods thus far.
And this is where it all seems to lose touch with reality. We may never have a vaccine, certainly not for a year or even much longer; and the threshold for an “effective” treatment is undefined but we may not have something that meets these requirements.
The clarifications at today’s press conference (via Capitol Fax) don’t help, either. Pritzker seems to suggest that “treatment” is “a very successful treatment” or, separately, a “highly effective treatment.” Asked about schools having more than 50 students, he says,
There would be strict IDPH guidelines for schools and we talked about this early on when we were trying to figure out if we needed to close schools or not, that, could you have classrooms of [garbled] kids meeting, if the restriction was 50 for example. And would that work and so the answer is IDPH is going to be working with schools on how they can best do this coming into the fall assuming that we’re in phase four.
Does Pritzker actually have a plan? Has he given serious consideration to how his phases will actually work in the real world? It certainly doesn’t appear as if he has a real answer with respect to children (neither “the data shows the risk to children is virtually nonexistent” nor “we’ll ask schools to come up with as many precautions as possible and eliminate assemblies and other gatherings”). Is he relying on the emergence of a game-changing treatment over the summer?
And nowhere in this plan is a mention of nursing homes and assisted living communities. When will their residents be able to see their families again, or even gather within the community? For those with cognitive issues, this is not merely about being patient but about their well-being.
Democrats are praising the plan, again according to Capitol Fax, with Senate President Don Harmon calling it “forward-looking” and Comptroller Susan Mendoza, “carefully-thought-out” and “science-based.” But there are so many holes — and, no, there is no reference to any sort of footnoted, detailed second document.
The bottom line is that this document is a serious disappointment. Using labels such as “recovery,” “revitalization,” and “restored” is nothing more than a cruel joke as long as the plan is so vague and unrealistic.
The mask mandate may indeed be a power overreach. Wear one anyway.
Today marks the start of the mask-mandate in Illinois. All persons over age 2 must wear a face mask in any public place in which they cannot maintain a six-foot distance from others — that is, indoors while shopping and in any crowded outdoor place.
Tutorials exist all over the internet: Save the manufactured masks for healthcare workers; use fabric. Use tightly-woven cotton, if possible. Add a non-woven inner layer via an opening for a filter, or a third layer of flannel. The Illinois mandate does not specify that one must wear a “face mask” per se but a covering of the nose and mouth, so that improvised options such as a bandana are also acceptable.
The Chicago Tribune has reported on various mask giveaways such as the group Masks4Chi which is importing fabric masks from Vietnam, as well as various community distribution efforts (which appear to be oriented around manufactured one-time masks). And, of course, large numbers of home sewers have been making masks and selling or giving them away — to nursing homes and assisted living communities, grocery store baggers, anyone they come across who’s in need. (Yes, I’m one of them — my current tally is 118 given away, and another dozen in various stages of completion — and it surprises me that the giveaway efforts don’t have a parallel organized effort to collect donations for the general public.)
Does Gov. Pritzker have the legal authority to mandate mask-wearing?
To be honest, I’m not sure. Downstate Rep. Darren Bailey filed suit against the stay-at-home order’s extension, and won a court victory, for himself, and subsequently Rep. John Cabello of Machesney Park filed suit calling for the same ruling to be applied to all Illinoisans. Are their legal arguments valid? I’ll be honest — I am not seeing reporting that answers that question. Instead, Pritzker and others react as if the pursuit of the greater good of public health prohibits even the asking of that question, though, at the same time, Pritzker has, in breaking news, rescinded a part of his executive order that prohibited religious gatherings, in reaction to a separate lawsuit. (Previously, even drive-in services were prohibited; now they will be allowed.)
And a Chicago Tribune editorial today called for the legislature to meet. Not only could they legislatively affirm Pritzker’s orders, but they could attend to other pressing state business, including the deadline on Monday for placing on the November ballot an amendment to end gerrymandering of General Assembly districts. The editorial notes that a one-time meeting would be sufficient for the legislature to enable virtual meetings; alternatively, Pritzker could use his power to convene the GA elsewhere — columnist John Kass suggests, for more-than-sufficient social distancing, the United Center. Of course, Kass also suggests that, behind the scenes, it’s House Speaker Michael Madigan calling the shots, and refusing to meet, so that Pritzker takes the heat.
What’s more, I’m seeing on Facebook plans to circumvent the mask requirement. After all, the ruling provides an exemption for those who cannot medically tolerate a mask. Claim to those who question you that you’re exempt for medical reasons, further insist that your medical privacy rights prohibit their questioning the specific ailment you have and, voila, you can skip the mask.
But here’s the bottom line: even if you object to the mandate, you should still wear a mask.
Yes, the CDC was foolish in its prior insistence that there is no value in mask-wearing, and, though I’ve speculated elsewhere as to why they did so, I’ve not seen a definitive (and convincing) explanation for this, nor for why, on April 3, they changed their recommendations. But even the Illinois Policy Institute, ordinarily an opponent of Pritzker, states plainly:
The point of wearing a mask is to protect others. The idea is that if one person is an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19, wearing a mask will limit their ability to transmit the virus to others.
Folks, I’ve been sewing face masks since so early on that when I first picked up fabric and notions I was able to get not only elastic but also “fun” Marvel print cotton fabric straight off the store shelves. Perhaps I’ve spent enough years as an international retirement actuary to have had on my radar more than others that we can reasonably look at what’s going on in other places, and early on it was clear that places like Hong Kong and Taiwan had both a firmer control on the coronavirus than elsewhere and had a practice of wearing masks. (Yes, I first blogged about this on my personal blog on March 16, in which I speculated about whether face mask-wearing could ever take root in the U.S.; four days later, I had convinced myself that sewing was the right thing to do, even though the calls were mostly for healthcare workers. When did I first don a face mask myself when going out to the store? I’m not sure.)
It might feel that wearing a mask gives a “win” to Pritzker, that you’re sacrificing your freedom. I get that.
But face mask-wearing is important to protect those around you, in the event, however unlikely you consider it to be, that you have yourself been unknowingly infected. And even if you judge it impossible to have been infected, face mask-wearing is a visible way to encourage those around you to wear masks, so that any one of your friends, neighbors, or fellow shoppers who is unknowing infectious, will wear a face mask and protect those around them.
I suspect that those who protest this order nonetheless consider themselves to be good citizens who care about the welfare of others, even if they’d rather it not be mandated. I, too, wish we had all adopted mask-wearing practices without a mandate. But that’s where we are. And, to be honest, I am at least glad not to be the “weirdo in a mask” any longer.
Forbes post, “No, Gov. Pritzker, Illinois Pension Reform Isn’t A Fantasy”
Originally published at Forbes.com on February 21, 2020.
On Wednesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker gave his budget address, an address in which he promises wide-ranging spending boosts paid for by — yes, you guessed it — the same three sources of newfound state wealth of pot legalization, gambling expansion, and a tax hike on the rich subsequent to voters approving a constitutional amendment to permit graduated taxation rates.
And once again, he addressed pensions in a wholly unsatisfactory way. Here’s the full text of this part of his speech:
“One of Illinois’ most intractable problems is the underfunding of our pension systems.
“We must keep our promises to the retirees who earned their pension benefits and forge a realistic path forward to meet those obligations.
“The fantasy of a constitutional amendment to cut retirees’ benefits is just that – a fantasy. The idea that all of this can be fixed with a single silver bullet ignores the protracted legal battle that will ultimately run headlong into the Contracts Clause of the U.S. Constitution. You will spend years in that protracted legal battle, and when you’re done, you will have simply kicked the can down the road, made another broken promise to taxpayers, and left them with higher tax bills.
“This is not a political football. This is a financial issue that is complex and requires consistency and persistence to manage, with the goal of paying the pensions that are owed.
“That’s why my budget delivers on our full pension payment and then some, with $100 million from the proceeds of the graduated income tax dedicated directly to paying down our pension debt more quickly. We should double that number in subsequent years. Next year would be the first year in state history that we will make a pension payment over and above what is required in statute. It begins to allow us to bend the cost curve and reduce our net pension liability faster.
“At the same time, without breaking our promises, we must relentlessly pursue pension initiatives that reduce the burden on taxpayers. This year, the State’s required payment to the State Employees Retirement System alone will be $32 million less than it would’ve been without the optional pension buyout program. We extended that program last year – because it’s good for taxpayers. That’s why I’ve asked all of the state’s retirement systems to fully implement buyout programs across all our systems.
“What we do to reduce future net pension liabilities for our state and local pension plans has enormously positive benefits for taxpayers. Last year, working with members of this General Assembly, we did what no one had been able to do after more than 70 years of trying: consolidate the investments of the 650 local police and firefighters funds into two statewide systems. Because of their collective size, these funds are projected to see billions of dollars of improved returns over the next 20 years. That means lower property tax pressure on families and businesses across the state.
“This is a great example of how both sides of the aisle can come together with reasonable solutions to address intractable problems. Let’s continue on that path.”
And I will repeat what I have said over and over again (to link merely to the two most recent instances):
Pritzker is deluding himself and misleading Illinoisans when he provides his now-standard set of responses.
The most recent calculation of Illinois’ pensions liabilities stands at a debt of $137.3 billion, as of fiscal 2019 year-end. In 2021, contributions are expected to reach $11 billion, or 27% of the total state spending.
Pritzker’s promise to boost contributions by $100 million in 2021 and $200 million thereafter, if the graduated income tax amendment passes, is a drop in the bucket.
The reduction in liabilities due to the buyout programs are likewise a trivial portion of the total. What’s more, the reform-promoting group Wirepoints has been seeking evidence of the numbers Pritzker has been touting for the programs’ savings, and is being stonewalled.
The consolidation of local police and fire pensions’ asset management that Pritzker boasts of came about not because of his superior leadership skills but because these communities were up against a wall in a way that they hadn’t been in the past due to the 2011 “pension intercept” law and funding ramp causing serious pain in a way that hadn’t been the case before. And, what’s more, even this baby step was only for local pensions, so it makes no dent in the $137 billion, and this was botched even so, with a boost in Tier 2 pensions included with no analysis of the cost.
With respect to a constitutional amendment, he creates a straw man by claiming that reformers’ objective is to “cut retirees’ benefits” when the objective of such an amendment is not to cut benefits at all, but to provide the state with the flexibility to reduce future benefit accruals or increases.
And as to the claim that this will result in a “protracted legal battle that will ultimately run headlong into the Contracts Clause of the U.S. Constitution”? This is repeated over and over again by opponents of reform, and has become the new talking point after Pritzker seems to have abandoned his prior claim that it’s simply impossible to amend the state constitution. And here Mark Glennon at Wirepoints provides a clear explanation of why this claim is not credible, worth quoting in full:
“Pritzker is either dishonest or horribly misinformed. Court rulings and actual experience in other states make it clear that Pritzker is wrong. A pension amendment would almost certainly work to allow for needed reforms to most of our 667 public pensions in Illinois.
“Why? Let’s put this in plain English, without legalese:
“The most recent lesson from the courts came last year in Rhode Island after the City of Cranston lowered certain pension benefits. Some pensioners went to court trying to invalidate the cuts. There was no state constitutional issue there, making the case just like we’d have here after a proper constitutional amendment.
“So, the only thing pensioners could base their case on was the U.S Constitution, including the Contract Clause Pritzker referred to. That clause prohibits states from breaking contracts, and pensions are contracts.
“But the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled against the pensioners. The Contract Clause and other U.S. constitutional matters are not blanket rules against breaking contracts, the court reminded us. The United States Supreme Court has long said that.
“The Rhode Island court weighed all the circumstances in making its decision – how hard off Cranston, RI was, the reasonableness of the reforms and similar matters. Protecting contract rights gives way when there’s a ‘higher public purpose,’ as one nationally recognized legal expert put it.
“That is, government has to be able to provide proper services. Pension costs were squeezing out money for proper services in Cranston, just as in Illinois.
“’We the People,’ in other words, are not bound by a suicide pact because of the Contract Clause or anything else in the U.S. Constitution. Pensioners tried to appeal their loss to the United States Supreme Court but the high court let the Rhode Island decision stand [emphasis mine].
“Then there’s Arizona’s experience. It had a state constitutional pension protection clause just like in Illinois. They’ve amended it twice to cut benefits, mostly with the approval of union pensioners. Unlike Illinois, most of them saw the long-term benefit of reform even for pensioners.
“However, not all pensioners agreed with the cuts. Yet none has sued under the Contract Clause or anything else. Still to this day any one of them could sue if they thought they could win, individually or as a group. They would sue if Pritzker were right about pension amendments being ‘fantasy.’ They haven’t. They know they’d lose.”
So, yes, if the state reduced future accruals or pension increases for arbitrary or capricious reasons, the Contracts Clause would prohibit it. But that’s not what’s under discussion here.
And it’s likewise not acceptable to defer the debt burden to the next generation.
As it happens, separately, I was asked by a reader the other day to explain a statement on the Teachers’ Retirement System website which appeared to say that there was no serious cause for concern and that “current obligations are well met”:
“If all TRS obligations for current retirees and active teachers were called due today, the System could not meet 60 percent of those outstanding pensions and benefits. But that can never happen because not all teachers will retire at the same time. By law, active teachers cannot collect retirement benefits, so TRS must pay out only what is owed to benefit recipients in that year. In fiscal year 2019, TRS paid out $6.7 billion in benefits and collected $8.1 billion in total revenue.”
(To be clear, the reader didn’t believe that to be true but was unsure how to understand this statement.)
This statement points out the very true fact that the system is not insolvent; the system is at no real risk of insolvency unless the state cuts down or abandons its statutory funding requirements, and even then, the plan can pay benefits from its existing assets for quite some time. (See the table at the bottom of my article from January, “Six Key Charts That Prove Why There Is No Alternative To Pension Reform In Illinois.”)
But “not insolvent” is an unacceptably low bar.
It’s not OK for the state’s pension plans to be merely “not insolvent.” It’s not OK to pass the debt on from one generation to the next, and the injustice done to the next generation by saddling them with this debt isn’t justified by the fact that they might, in turn, choose to saddle yet another generation with debt, if they can get away with it. And, again, the existing funding target of 90% in 2045 relies so heavily on a 7% asset return and on the unsustainably-low Tier 2 benefits that, should that rate be cut or the Tier 2 benefits cuts be undone, that 90% will be far more costly to reach than is even the case at present.
All of which comes down to this: it’s not pension reformists who are constructing a fantasy. It’s Pritzker himself.
December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.
Why JB Pritzker is a Prosperity Gospel Preacher
Joel Osteen may not be a household name, but he’s a familiar face among the inspirational books at your local Target. Literally – his books, with titles such as “Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential” and “Next Level Thinking: 10 Powerful Thoughts for a Successful and Abundant Life,” feature his big smile on the front cover. He’s one of those preachers about whom it’s best to say that he identifies as Christian, because the message that he preaches, given the name Prosperity Gospel, doesn’t look all too much like actual Christian doctrine. Instead, he tells his audience, in his 56,000-seat converted-stadium Lakewood Church, and in his books, that they are made for greatness if only they “Name and Claim” the material prosperity that is the destiny of all who have enough faith.
It’s the sort of belief that’s routinely mocked by the satire site The Babylon Bee, with such articles as “Report: Imprisoned Chinese Christians Maintaining Faith By Secretly Reading Smuggled, Tattered Copy Of ‘Your Best Life Now’“, “Joel Osteen Targets Millennials With New Book: ‘You Can Even!’“, and the Snopes fact-checked classic “Joel Osteen Sails Luxury Yacht Through Flooded Houston To Pass Out Copies Of ‘Your Best Life Now’,” which “reports” that:
Osteen had his on-call yacht captain steer the large vessel through the flooded streets of the city, pulling up to survivors stranded on their roofs and on the roof of their cars as the prosperity gospel preacher smiled, waved, and threw out signed editions of the bestselling positive thinking book.
“Believe and declare you are coming into a shift!” Osteen yelled through a bullhorn, according to reports. “God wants His best for you! Enlarge your vision, develop a healthy self image, and choose to be happy!”
“When you think positive, excellent thoughts, you will be propelled toward greatness!” he called out to one family floating on a raft on a freeway-turned-river, whose earthly possessions had been entirely destroyed the previous day.
And when I listen to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, in his speeches and interviews, I hear a lot of Prosperity Gospel hucksterism. Oh, sure, he doesn’t want us to send him “seed money,” but he wants us to believe — to believe that all that ails the state of Illinois is negative thinking, and what’s needed to fix the state is to name and claim our future prosperity by believing that the state is doing well and destined for more business investment.
In an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago back in November, he said,
We spent years where the leader of the state and allies were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell all of us how bad the state is. . . . The narrative we need to change is that we can’t solve these problems. . . . The reality is these are hard . . . . we need to focus on . . . pensions, property taxes, balancing the budget, paying down our bill backlog, and growing jobs in the state. . . . But the narrative about Illinois is we are a state on the rise.That we’ve had our challenges, that’s for sure. That we were going in the wrong direction, but we are turning the ship in the right direction, and we are powering ourselves forward.”
(This is my transcription paired with an additional citation from Wirepoints.)
And in his State of the State speech earlier this week, Pritzker said,
Those who would shout doom and gloom might be loud – using social media bots and paid hacks to advance their false notions – but they are not many. You see, we’re wresting the public conversation in Illinois back from people concerned with one thing and one thing only — predicting total disaster, spending hundreds of millions of dollars promoting it, and then doing everything in their power to make it happen.
I’m here to tell the carnival barkers, the doomsayers, the paid professional critics – the State of our State is growing stronger each day.
Is Illinois’ economic well-being and financial state improving? It’s still second from the bottom in “taxpayer burden” according to the watchdog group Truth in Accounting. Chicago is likewise second-worst among the 75 largest cities. Among the 10 largest cities, Chicago is worst in terms of total debt (city, county, and state) taxpayers face — and I presume that if they’d had the resources for a more extensive analysis, Chicago would still be at the bottom. Watchdog group Wirepoints compiled a long list of unpleasant narratives, including a worst-in-the-nation credit rating, one notch above junk, falling home prices, and rankings of news outlets such as U.S. News and World Report (worst state in the nation for fiscal stability), Kiplinger (least tax-friendly), and WalletHub (highest tax burden).
Who are the hucksters and carnival barkers? It’s Pritzker himself who fits the bill, promising voters that a graduated income tax would mean forgoing shared sacrifice in favor of a tax cut for nearly everyone and would save the day not only by filling budget holes but by generating extra cash for property tax reductions, and believing that sufficient levels of optimism will lead corporations to eagerly locate new offices and factories in the state.
And as for me — well, if you can tell me how to turn my frustration at pension debt into the business of being a paid hack, I’m all ears.
The State of the State is Not So Great (An Illinois Rant)
Yes, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker gave his “state of the state” speech today, and, a year into his term, it’s no surprise that he’s celebrating — and it’s no surprise that I’m skeptical.
What does he say? Let’s take a look.
Today the Illinois economy supports 6.2 million jobs. This is the most jobs on record for our state, and we now have the lowest unemployment rate in history. . . . Over the past year, Illinois has reduced its unemployment rate more than ALL of the top twenty most populated states in the nation — and more than our Midwestern peers.
Note that phrasing — “reduced . . . more.” Illinois’s current unemployment rate is 3.7%. That’s above-average, in a 5-way tie for 31st. Michigan’s is higher, yes, at 3.9, and Ohio at 4.2. But Wisconsin is at 3.4, Missouri 3.3, Indiana 3.2, and Iowa 2.7.
237 Illinois businesses from all over the state made Inc Magazine’s List of Fastest Growing Businesses in the Nation.
That’s not all that spectacular in a ranking of 5000 companies; Illinois’s population works out to 3.9% of the total population of the US, and we have 4.7% of the fastest-growing businesses. Yay, I guess?
Illinois is the second-largest producer of computer science degrees in the nation, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all computer science degrees awarded in the entire United States.
Yes, the University of Illinois is highly ranked in this field, and has actively recruited international (Chinese) students to pay full-price tuition.
Pritzker trumpets the “balanced” budget (however precarious that balance is, relying as it does on one time gambling and pot license fees) and the infrastructure bill (laden with the inevitable pork for Democratic legislators to “give” to their constituents).
He touts apprenticeships — though not as a general program but insofar as public works projects will be required to include, ahem, “diverse employees” (that is, code for underrepresented minorities).
He boasts that pot legalization will “result in 63,000 new jobs” (ugh, again – if these are new jobs rather than newly-legal jobs, then does that mean the state is banking on more people taking up using pot, rather than merely coming out from the black market?), and new “tax revenue from the residents of Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa and Indiana” (more ugh – it’s in bad taste to plan on enticing out-of-staters to come here to buy produces illegal in their home state).
Pritzker praises the restoration of driver’s licenses for those with unpaid parking tickets and fines, which is worthy enough. He makes the same claim of having gotten a start on fixing pensions based on two small changes which promise “free money” rather than tough sacrifices.
He praises himself for more changes:
We raised the minimum wage, advanced equal pay for women and minorities, provided millions of Illinoisans relief from high interest on consumer debt, and expanded health care to tens of thousands more people across the state.
Of these, it remains to be seen how rural areas will cope with a high minimum wage. I don’t recall offhand what Pritzker did in furtherance of equal pay (maybe one of those laws that prospective employers can’t ask for past salary history?), I am guessing that the interest relief was an under-the-radar interest rate cap, and I’m puzzled by the healthcare expansion since Medicaid was expanded some years ago with Obamacare.
Working with Senator Andy Manar, we capped out-of-pocket insulin costs at $100 for a 30-day supply so that no one in Illinois has to decide between buying food and paying for the medicine they need to stay alive.
Er, make that, “no one with a diagnosis of diabetes” . . .
We expanded insurance coverage for mammograms and reproductive health.
This is Pritzker’s only reference to his abortion expansion law, in which insurance companies are required to cover abortion. “Reproductive health,” my a**. The mammograms bit is, from memory, a matter of requring that insurance companies cover follow-up testing for mammograms without cost-sharing. Which is fine enough but every insurance coverage mandate boosts premiums, and it’s really not right for legislators to pat themselves on the back as if they’ve made a real difference when they’re just shifting costs in a politically popular way for certain favored ailments.
We stopped bad-mouthing the state and started passing laws that make Illinois more attractive for businesses and jobs. Working across the aisle, we brought tax relief for 300,000 small businesses through the phase out of the corporate franchise tax. And we laid the groundwork for new high-paying tech jobs by opening new business incubators, by incentivizing the building of new data centers, and by investing $100 million in a University of Illinois and University of Chicago partnership that will make Illinois the quantum computing capital of the world.
This is what bugs me: Pritzker repeatedly makes the claim that what was wrong with Illinois in the past, and what prevented businesses from investing here, was that we were “bad-mouthing the state.” And then it’s back to the same-old same-old: special tax treatment (“phase out of the corporate franchise tax” . . . “incentivizing the building of new data centers”) and more government spending (“clean energy legislation” which, to my knowledge, consists of some combination of state subsidies and mandates for solar and wind generation, and $100 million based on Pritzker’s say-so).
But at the same time, it is commendable that he spent a significant amount of time addressing corruption, in light of the guilty plea yesterday of former state Senator Martin Sandoval.
And now we have to work together to confront a scourge that has been plaguing our political system for far too long. We must root out the purveyors of greed and corruption — in both parties — whose presence infects the bloodstream of government. It’s no longer enough to sit idle while under-the-table deals, extortion, or bribery persist. Protecting that culture or tolerating it is no longer acceptable. We must take urgent action to restore the public’s trust in our government.
But then he says,
That’s why we need to pass real, lasting ethics reform this legislative session.
But Sandoval and all the other crooks were not engaged in shady, unethical-but-not-illegal actions. They were actual crooks. And he addresses that —
Change needs to happen. And much of this change needs to happen outside of the scope of legislation. It’s about how we, as public officials, conduct ourselves in private that also matters.
But this is after a long digression into his commitment to diversity, which leaves me quite skeptical as to whether he really “gets” it or whether he thinks it’s simply time for other groups to have a turn helping themselves to the spoils.
The bottom line for me — and admittedly my opinion counts for squat — is that, because of years upon years of literal corruption as well as indifference to fiscal prudence, Pritzker, as well as, really, any Illinois politician, has a very high threshold to cross to prove that they are working to further the well-being of the people of Illinois, rather than enriching their own pocketbook or making happy the interest groups who have enabled their election, and that they are adequately evaluating the consequences of their plans rather than convincing themselves that liberally spending money is the path to prosperity.
I don’t see anything yet that shows he has earned that trust. Not the “found money” gimmicks of pot and gambling expansion. Not the so-called “fair tax” in which, rather than calling for everyone to shoulder increased taxes, he promises that “the rich” will pay for everything, including a (trivial) tax cut for the rest of us. And certainly not the “infrastructure” giveaways.
So there you have it. Do you trust Pritzker, or, really, anyone in Illinois government?