Fred Klonsky’s PREA Prez Blog

One of the things I found frustrating when I talked with Senator Kotowski was his position that you could adequately fund the pension systems and public schools without new taxes.

He was absolutely againt the governor’s Gross Receipts Tax and he was non-committal on SB 750, the tax swap.

Well, I want to be clear.

I think he said two things.

First, he said, the legislature has to win the trust of the taxpayers that their taxes are being spent wisely.

I asked several times if he was saying that this was a prerequiste for supporting, SB 750, which swaps property taxes for an increase in the state income tax.

His answer was not clear to me.

He also said his focus was on the state pension situation. He seemed to require no prerequisite on tax policy for that issue.

Over on Open Board Blog a north suburban school board member reports on a forum he attended this weekend on the battle over school funding in Springfield.

Yesterday I attended a forum on state education funding reform organized and hosted by local officials and reform advocates. The forum featured 3 local state legislators who briefly gave their views on the state of funding reform and then took some questions from the audience. Unfortunately, two out of the three left before the Q & A session so the interaction and answers were somewhat limited.

Anyway, the 3 legislators were:

Rep. Lou Lang

Sen. Jeff Schoenberg

Sen. Ira Silverstein

My general impressions from the meeting were:

Everyone (including legislators) wants something to be done.
Nobody can agree on what to do.
The good news is the funding reform movement has more momentum than it’s had in a decade.
The bad news is this still won’t necessarily translate into legislative action.
Local legislators still don’t have the backbone to champion a cause they vocally support.
My larger takeaway is that the word “tax” is so tainted, elected officials can no longer have reasonable and rational discussions about it. Rep. Lou Lang spoke to this very point. It’s the 10-ton elephant in the room.

This, I think, is one of the most dubious achievements of the conservative movement: to take occasional past government ineptitude and use it to broadly discredit a legitimate government function, the collection of revenue. Thanks guys, this is now your dysfunctional and crippled government at work. Spending isn’t going away but responsible ways of paying for it are becoming endangered. Even though funding reform in Illinois means shifting the burden from local homeowners to statewide taxpayers, if the plan includes the nuclear word “tax”, then legislators run and hide.

I guess conservatives can gloat and be proud of their anti-tax efforts and liberals can keep fumbling about, searching for a third way. Meanwhile, all of us suffer. This is some way to run a government.

And that really is that. Until we hear otherwise from Springfield (in the form of a shocking news flash), my guess is this is going to be the status quo for quite some time.

I’ve decided to move over to WordPress as my blog publisher. It’ll take me a little time to get the hang of it. And I’ll be playing around with the layout. But my mac blog site isn’t really designed for what I want to do. You can’t create a blog roll, for example. It doesn’t track hits very easily. And you can only post from one computer, at least without moving everything over with a flash card. And, of the blog publishers I’ve looked at, WordPress seems pretty good.

There will be a link from my old site for a while.