A small step in right direction on budget crisis

Let’s acknowledge from the start that no one can envy the position in which Gov. Pat Quinn finds himself. It is much easier to be a great leader, a great governor, when the economy is humming along nicely and no social or humanitarian crises are howling outside the door.

But those are not the conditions that confront Quinn and his colleagues in Springfield. Their task is to tame monumental problems whose howling has been disregarded for years in the midst of an economic downturn of historic proportions.

At last on Wednesday, the governor appeared to recognize the ugly responsibility facing him and the legislature. Unfortunately, his promised “rendezvous with reality” budget speech sounded more like an invitation to view reality than a confrontation with it, but it did at least carve out a place to start.

The great disappointment in Quinn’s address was its continuation of the trend it identified and condemned. Yes, former governors and former legislatures failed to do anything for years, even when the grim realities lurked ominously and obviously on a very near horizon. But the governor’s speech merely repeats that practice by passing off the state budget’s two most voracious predators — pension reform and Medicaid reform — to blue ribbon panels.

The key difference between the speech and past practice, of course, is that the speech at least recognizes that someone is working on the problems and establishes a timetable for some ideas. But the bottom line is still delay. And given the urgency and magnitude of our crisis — consider that the Chicago Civic Federation says that not a dime of the 67 percent income tax increase we all are paying this year will go to the state’s budget deficit, instead being entirely consumed by the growing demand of pension obligations — we really need the kind of leadership that promises immediate action.

It is one thing for Gov. Quinn to say of fixing the pension mess, as he did, that “we must do it now.” It would be something better for him to offer the plan or even some intriguing ideas.

He did, of course, emphasize the April 17 deadline for his committee’s pensions “blueprint,” and that deadline is welcome. But in the context of Illinois legislative precedent, it is still not a reassuring time frame for proposals that would presumably have to be debated, reviewed and approved within a little more than a month.

As for Medicaid, despite telling lawmakers they wouldn’t go home without a solution, he promised only to follow the still unwritten “road map” of the separate working group he assembled for that crisis and to “engage (lawmakers) every day until we have an affordable and high-quality Medicaid program.”

In a conference call with newspaper editorial boards following the speech, the governor’s budget experts emphasized that they expect solutions to the pension and Medicaid during the coming legislative session. We certainly hope that will happen; we just can’t see from the governor’s speech how.

Our disappointments notwithstanding, the governor did lay out a series of program cuts and closings that is not insubstantial. He did promise 9 percent spending cuts in his own budget and tell many other agencies to expect at least that.

And he saved his most important assertion for the closing line of the speech: “Loyalty to the common good is far more important in Illinois today than loyalty to your caucus or loyalty to your lobbyist. It’s time to put progress ahead of politics in Illinois.”

It absolutely is. The governor’s speech at last helped us see that he knows what the “common good” is. But we’re not going to know whether anyone has the will to achieve it until we see specifically what achieving it will take.