Editorial: Have Illinois' Problems Outgrown Its Leaders?
From the Chicago Tribune
As students, we learn that self-governance relies on good faith: We elect to office the candidates we view as most capable, then trust them to manage us through crises we can see and those we can't anticipate. When we choose well, our officials have the skills and moxie to get us through whatever comes.
In Illinois, though, that process gradually seized up, ossified, and now has plain collapsed. Many of the people who have run state government in this century are fine folks. But they have let their ruinous financial policies define this state's bleak present and future. Their chosen victims range from people who rely on state services, to suppliers Springfield pays when it can, to employers who won't invest in this Titanic, to taxpayers who fork over more and more for less and less.
Last week the credit agencies that again downgraded Illinois applied an almost pitying tone to the dysfunction here: They questioned the competence of current leadership. Emphasis ours: On Monday, Fitch Ratings said legislators' failure to reform pensions "exacerbates concern about management's willingness and ability to address the state's numerous fiscal challenges." Two days later, Moody's Investors Service wrote, "An A3 rating, while very low for a U.S. state, is consistent with the General Assembly's inability to steer the state from a path to fiscal distress."
The question for voters to ask, and urgently: Have our leaders so profoundly abused and neglected Illinois that rescuing it is beyond their limited capacities?
Read more in our daily News Update...
From the Chicago Tribune
As students, we learn that self-governance relies on good faith: We elect to office the candidates we view as most capable, then trust them to manage us through crises we can see and those we can't anticipate. When we choose well, our officials have the skills and moxie to get us through whatever comes.
In Illinois, though, that process gradually seized up, ossified, and now has plain collapsed. Many of the people who have run state government in this century are fine folks. But they have let their ruinous financial policies define this state's bleak present and future. Their chosen victims range from people who rely on state services, to suppliers Springfield pays when it can, to employers who won't invest in this Titanic, to taxpayers who fork over more and more for less and less.
Last week the credit agencies that again downgraded Illinois applied an almost pitying tone to the dysfunction here: They questioned the competence of current leadership. Emphasis ours: On Monday, Fitch Ratings said legislators' failure to reform pensions "exacerbates concern about management's willingness and ability to address the state's numerous fiscal challenges." Two days later, Moody's Investors Service wrote, "An A3 rating, while very low for a U.S. state, is consistent with the General Assembly's inability to steer the state from a path to fiscal distress."
The question for voters to ask, and urgently: Have our leaders so profoundly abused and neglected Illinois that rescuing it is beyond their limited capacities?
Read more in our daily News Update...