Now, budget statesmanship needed

Thanks to the Cook County Board, Todd Stroger has an unusual opportunity to demonstrate the qualities of a statesman.

Yes, he has to cut about $200 million in spending from the county's next budget. But, yes, that's also just over 6 percent of the budget overall.

Stroger would have Cook County taxpayers believe that the only place to find that 6 percent is in the county's vast healthcare apparatus.

It's a common response from political leaders lacking the ability or the willpower to dip their hands up to the elbows in the murky stew of government spending and prudently remove purchases and programs. Faced with a crisis of his own in the state spending plan, the once-citizen-minded Patrick Quinn also has sounded very Strogerlike. From the time he took over from ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich, he has repeatedly vowed that Illinois' desperate financial problems can be solved in one of only two ways - hiking taxes or slashing social programs that help the state's neediest citizens.

But taxpayers, who themselves have been getting by only through massive changes in their saving and spending habits, know different. No one expects Todd Stroger to find $200 million (that's his estimate by the way; others on the county board think the sum may be more in the range of $118 million) hidden under his mattress or Gov. Quinn to find $9 billion - or $7 billion or $12 billion or whatever the constantly shifting estimate of the state's revenue shortfall actually is - stuffed in a drawer in the governor's mansion. Trimming spending in these amounts is hard, we know.

But, for committed statesmen, it is doable.

Cook County Commissioner Forrest Claypool called Tuesday's vote "a step toward more efficient government." And Commissioner John Daley acknowledged, "We must reboot county government."

These officials have it right. But they and their colleagues at all levels of government also have a role of their own to play in solving government's fiscal dilemmas. Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica hinted at that role when he vowed to "fight like a tiger" to make sure none of the county's three hospitals or 16 health clinics close.

Peraica must be held to that vow, as other county board members should as well. They should be looking at the programs they've supported personally and asking of themselves the same sacrifices they demand from top leaders. Commissioner Timothy Schneider, of Bartlett, suggested a 5 percent cut across the board - and that has to be a viable point to begin discussion.

Stroger is wrong to state that the media and other critics are out to get him personally. That is not true. We are out to get profligate, unchecked government spending. And it is not only the top leaders who must be held accountable. It's time for all politicians to roll up their sleeves and stick their hands in that dark stew of expenses.

In Cook County, Todd Stroger has lost the battle to tax county residents into a budget solution. Now, he must take an honest, clear approach to county spending and enlist his critics in the process. We are not naive about whether he will actually do that - but we know that if he took a new approach, he could show his colleagues at all levels how real budget balancing is done.