The irony would be amusing, were the stakes not so serious. The very day that the United States Congress passed sweeping legislation that will undermine the economy, increase debt and send tax rates soaring, a leading liberal media outlet criticized the elected officials who have been in charge of the president’s home state for repeatedly passing legislation that has: undermined Illinois’ economy, increased Illinois’ debt and sent Illinois tax rates soaring, thus poisoning the business environment and employment prospects in the state. It appears that government’s mission isn’t to tax and spend. Who knew?

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It will be hard to believe, but when Illinois Democrats passed all of the legislation that got Illinois into this cesspool of a fiscal crisis, both they and the MSM assured voters that the there was nothing to worry about. These great new programs, they said, will actually make the state more prosperous and, if you disagreed with that proposition, then you were obviously a crabby conservative trying make political hay at the expense of what was obviously the best thing for the people of the state of Illinois. Sound familiar?

Having seen the light, the Chicago Tribune urged readers to clean house in Springfield in a May 21 editorial, because the current bunch of Illinois legislators have created an untenable financial crisis and refuse to fix it. No kidding. Mrs. O’Leary’s fiscally irresponsible cow not only kicked over the lantern and ran out of the barn in Illinois a long time ago, she’s now grazing contentedly along the banks of the Potomac River.

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Still, it’s nice for the Trib to finally notice:

State government’s free-fall into insolvency was designed intentionally and executed methodically. Over the years, legislators devoted more to hoarding power and ensuring their re-election than to smart governance. They repeatedly created employee benefits, entitlement coverage and spending obligations that the people of Illinois cannot pay as costs come due.

That’s a keeper. Substitute “federal government” for “state government” and “the United States” for “Illinois” and you have a paragraph that the Trib can trot out again around 2020. That’s about when the Trib’s editors will figure out that the reason the United States is $100 trillion in debt and unemployment rates are competing with inflation rates to see which can soar the highest is because Congress created – starting on May 21, 2010, “employee benefits, entitlement coverage and spending obligations” that are simply unsustainable.

How to solve Illinois’ problems? The Trib hit upon a novel solution:

You can re-elect lawmakers who, for two decades, have grown state obligations at twice the rate of inflation. Or you can mobilize en masse and elect a responsive new legislature.

Gosh, thanks for the advice Tribune editorial-writers. Anyone reading your paper for the last decade would be forgiven for assuming that there’s some sort of state law that requires Illinois residents to vote Democrat. Illinois Democrats have had control of both chambers of the legislature and the Governor’s office for eight years and have spent most of their time spending tax dollars, most of which don’t yet exist, like a drunken sailor on shore leave. It would have been something of a public service for the old media to notice what was happening before now – before Illinois’ economic situation could be described in the following terms:

… (Illinois ranks) a pathetic 48th in job creation (and) now suffers an unemployment rate of 12.2 percent, the highest in 27 years. Here’s a damning metric: The January jobless rate in all 12 Illinois metro areas exceeded the previous year’s rate — for the 32nd consecutive month.

Might the Tribune have seen this crisis coming before it reached these epic proportions? It might have, had the paper been listening to conservative Illinois Republicans who predicted this was going to happen as far back as 2002. That was when then Illinois state senator Steve Rauschenberger, a strong fiscal conservative and a Republican, outlined in horrifying detail exactly how the state’s economy was going to crash and burn if Blagojevich and the Democrats went forward with their plans. And, at that point, all Blago and the Dems were doing was robbing state pension funds to pay for other government goodies.

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It got worse, much worse, after they implemented the Illinois version of universal healthcare. Today, the situation is so bad that health-care providers have had to wait nine months to a year or more for Medicaid reimbursements from the state, with the predictable reductions in access to care. Thus, “improving” health care in Illinois has only made it worse.

Sounds like the model that Barack Obama, who helped create this mess as a state senator by the way, is going to emulate on a national scale, doesn’t it?

The Trib was all but blind to what was going on as the crisis was building in Illinois. They gleefully joined in the “Great Bush Bash of 2006,” which saw Democrats swept into office in overwhelming numbers. When Republican state level candidates in Illinois tried to make state finances the focus of their campaigns in 2006, the newspaper’s editorial board was much more interested in a candidate’s views on immigration reform (which isn’t in the purview of state government), abortion (ditto), and – I’m not making this up – whether foie gras should be illegal or not. The economy was going to hell in a hand basket and the Trib wanted to talk about goose liver. Now that it’s clear to everyone this side of Richie Daley that Illinois Democrats have screwed up Illinois so badly that it’s going to take a Herculean effort to fix this state, the Trib is reacting like Claude Raines in Casablanca.


They are “shocked, shocked!” to find that the lawmakers in Springfield have been so irresponsible. And, if Barack Obama’s grand plan to socialize medicine in the United States is not somehow derailed, we can expect to have much the same conversation in about ten years, on a much larger scale.