The state's search for budget reality

Today, Gov. Pat Quinn unveils a delayed, anxiously awaited budget plan for the coming year. He has promised - threatened? - it will be a "reality budget," and apparently is set to propose a five-tiered program for cutting costs and increasing revenues. A tax increase apparently remains up in the air, but the plan certainly relies on heavy borrowing.

Yet, when the governor's speech is complete, the difficult assignment for Illinois citizens, sadly, will be to separate hyperbole from harsh truth.

For, nearly all prior examinations of the budget, whether from the governor or from lawmakers or from the individual agencies affected, have been choked with overstatement and selfishness. What limited cuts the governor has already undertaken have targeted some of the programs and social services most likely to arouse political passions and stir sentiments supporting higher taxes.

Whether from the governor or lawmakers, proposals to increase revenues have either concentrated on questionable sources, such as increased gambling, or, like the governor's previously proposed 50 percent income tax increase, have represented a fix-all approach that failed to account for a significant new attitude toward government spending.

And recipients of state aid have, virtually to a one, cried out that any reductions - or, in many cases, even any hold-the-line allotment - from the state will lead to catastrophe. In politically tinged budget hearings last week, one agency after another trooped before lawmakers to describe the woe that would betide their group if they had to endure a 10 percent reduction.

University students, teachers and administrators have promised everything from massive program shutdowns to outright failure. The director of the Department of Corrections suggested that such reductions would mean "the money we've set aside to pay for things like food and staff payroll and those (things) we have a responsibility to do, we would not be able to do." A 10 percent cut and nobody in the prison system eats or gets paid? Where in all this is the "reality?"

The currently accepted figure for the state's budget deficit is about $12.7 billion. Addressing such a sum is going to require unfortunate sacrifices from every agency and every person in the state.

As Senior State Government Editor John Patterson reported this week, cutting every single state employee wouldn't solve the problem. Nor would doubling the income tax.

Solving this crisis surely must involve a creative mixture of revenue increases and spending cuts from which no person or group can be exempted. It surely must demand from nearly every corner of government the same kind of painful cuts in spending that private businesses have been enduring for years.

As citizens and as voters, we must not be fooled. Government can reduce spending. Agencies can live within their means. And when they do, when they've shown that the waste has been removed and the sacrifices have been fairly shared, then and only then, revenues can be found to close the remaining gap.

Expect nothing less and believe no politician or agency official who tells you something different.