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Back to Illinois, and that public sector union thing. (from Illinois Policy)

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Putting things on “automatic” just makes life so much easier in Illinois, at least for the state’s leaders.

No need to make politically unpopular decisions, because that state gasoline tax automatically goes up on July 1. Same for lawmakers giving themselves $1,800 raises while being able to claim: “We didn’t vote for those. They were automatic.”

And so it is for Gov. J.B. Pritzker. He doesn’t need any courage to face the state’s biggest government worker union and speak the truth about COVID-19 shutdowns blowing a $6 billion hole in the state’s revenues. On July 1 there will be $261 million in raises going to members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, automatically.

Nearly 1 in 4 Illinoisans is out of a job. Many are still fighting the state’s Rube Goldberg machine of an unemployment system to get the federal money they were promised.

So how fair is it that some of the highest-paid state employees in the nation are getting a raise that must be funded by an economically wounded bunch of taxpayers?

Pritzker dismissed the idea of delaying the state worker raises: “That’s not something that we’re currently having discussions about,” he said in late April.

But other governors, and specifically other Democratic governors, have taken action to preserve scarce cash as they deal with extra costs and crumbling tax bases thanks to the pandemic.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is canceling a 3% pay hike for some state employees and forcing one-day-a-week furloughs on 40,000 others to handle a nearly $9 billion shortfall.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo delayed raises for 80,000 state workers for 90 days, and is now considering employee buyouts. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam pushed back state worker raises, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf stopped paying 9,000 state workers on April 11.

Yet Illinois won’t even talk about public workers sharing some of the public’s pain. Instead, unemployed Illinoisans get put on hold for hours by the state and then cut off by a recorded message.

The Illinois Department of Employment Security has been an embarrassment throughout the COVID-19 shutdown. After weeks of excuses, Pritzker cobbled together fixes that included a $22 million, no-bid contract that took almost two months just to get federal money provided in late March into the hands of self-employed workers. The new system promptly exposed Social Security numbers of 32,483 applicants, and led to identity theft according to a federal lawsuit in St. Clair County.

Meanwhile, millions of dollars in state worker pay raises flow like water.

Illinois was a financial pit before COVID-19, driven mainly by overly generous public employee salaries and public pension spending handed out by the public servants whose campaigns were so generously supported by those public employees.

Illinois state workers in 2017 were the second-highest paid in the U.S. after adjusting for cost of living, averaging $61,207. More than half of them will become retirement millionaires as Illinois spends nearly double the national average, or more than 25% of the state’s operating budget, on pension costs.

The state’s pension crisis is driven in part by 3% compounded annual pension raises, which are – you guessed it – automatic.

Amending the Illinois Constitution could control those costs, and save the state’s five pension systems from either failing retirees or continuing to cost taxpayers ever more for fewer services. To get there Pritzker and state lawmakers need to take action, but that’s not something that they’re currently having discussions about.


Illinoisans cannot expect solutions if leaders automatically respond to the same old problems with the same unthinking behaviors.

I don't expect Cabinet heads to be "qualified", I'm surprised when they are.  Even if they have background, it's irrelevant in my view.  They are politicians and managers.

Yep. But they are the ones making the decisions. Hard to expect competence at the bottom when there isn't any at the top.

That is what elections are for.

For most, yes. But in Chicago, the entire school board is appointed by the mayor. The board negotiates contracts with the teacher's union, which throws considerable money to the campaigns of many politicians, including said mayor.

What could go wrong?

OK, so here's the report from the task force. As I've repeated many times, business and community involvement will be key components of this. Now, let's see if anything happens. From the Chicago Tribune:



Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s task force on Chicago’s COVID-19 recovery recommends the city accelerate spending on the South and West sides to address inequities deepened by the coronavirus, according to a copy of the group’s final report.
 
The 104-page document released Thursday, assembled by a task force chaired by Lightfoot and former President George H.W. Bush’s onetime chief of staff, Sam Skinner, recommends the city pursue a series of big goals that have long eluded Chicago leaders.
 
Chief among them is a series of recommendations aimed at fighting poverty and entrenched racism. The group’s report notes that COVID-19 has hit Black and Latino communities harder than white counterparts “and laid bare structural disparities in health outcomes, underlying health conditions, access to basic necessities, and safety net support.”
 
“The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 echoes the underlying inequity our city faced pre-COVID-19. Dramatic life expectancy gaps exist across communities. These decades-wide gaps are a result of a continued legacy of systemic racism and disinvestment in Chicago’s communities of color,” the report notes. “In virtually every measure — from economic and food security to access to broadband and mental health services — Chicago’s communities of color are faring the worst, a wrong that must be righted with meaningful transformation and change. The Task Force recommends the city’s existing strategies be accelerated and scaled.”
 
Unveiling the report at the South Shore Cultural Center, Lightfoot said the city lost $900 million from cancelled events as of April 20 and a third of Chicago jobs were at risk.
But she said the economic and public health crisis gives Chicago a chance to reinvent itself as a stronger, more equitable city — a transformation she said could be “the second Chicago renaissance.”
 
“This is a once in a generation moment for us,” Lightfoot said.
 
But making the report’s aspirations a reality will be much harder. It’s not clear how the city would pay for all of its recommendations and problems such as poverty and segregation are years in the making. Even the simple-sounding projects, such as creating a 211 phone line for people to call seeking social services, could be prohibitively expensive at a time when Chicago’s budget is squeezed by pension problems and the coronavirus-related economic shutdown.
 
Some of the report’s recommendations are broad and sweeping — one section of the report, for instance, calls for the city to end “economic hardship, and enable economic security and mobility.” Others deal with the nitty-gritty of Chicago’s economy and calls on officials to seize opportunities raised by the coronavirus crisis, including a recommendation that they “capture film and TV production opportunities given the lack of studio space in places like California.”
 
The report also says Chicago should continue pushing corporations to relocate their headquarters here, something the city was best in the country at under Lightfoot’s predecessor, Rahm Emanuel.
 
Lightfoot announced the task force in April, outside the Water Tower downtown as a nod to the city’s resilience and recovery from the Great Chicago Fire.

At the time, Lightfoot said she wanted Chicago to be a model for recovery across the country. Since then, the city’s reopened broad swaths of industry, though officials continue to warn that they will shut down businesses if residents fail to heed social distancing rules or if coronavirus cases spike.
 
The report also asks Chicago businesses to spend more to help the city achieve its goals.
 
“Throughout Chicago’s history — from rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire to building the Museum Campus to creating Millennium Park — corporations and the private sector have proven their ability to help transform our region for the better,” the report concluded. “We urge you to join us in this fight to help our recovery from COVID-19 and to lay the groundwork for a more equitable and inclusive region for generations to come. There is no better or more important time than now.”
 

I agree, my question is what can be done to support and guide today's children.  Good Schools are obviously a large factor, but the kids can only spend so much time at school.  How do we educate/inform/encourage/motivate today's parents and guardians to provide for today's children?

See above, and my post from yesterday. It's going to take a lot of time, but not 90 years. 20.

Smart people think the masses are dumb.

Curiously, dumb people agree.

I agree, my question is what can be done to support and guide today's children.  Good Schools are obviously a large factor, but the kids can only spend so much time at school.  How do we educate/inform/encourage/motivate today's parents and guardians to provide for today's children?

I don't know.  Those parents have their own subpar childhoods influencing their undesirable ideologies and behaviors now.  

What doesn't help are the positive, helpful parents removing their students from local public schools.  If the school community is positive and their child brings home positive things, that's going to make it more likely for the 'other' families to buy-in.  If their only contact are negative phone calls from school and their child only has negative stories to bring home, then it's the same old shit and they have no incentive to improve.

I've always taught at Title 1 schools and have lived in poorer areas and if I may, one thing I've learned is that when people are poor, anything that isn't an immediate need is irrelevant.  Following traffic laws?  Nah.  Holding a door open?  Right.  Sitting down with my child and asking them about their day, earnestly?  Nuh uh.  Turning down my music because it's late and my neighbors might not appreciate it?  Puh-lease.
I understand this is a wide, general...generalization.  It's unfair to many, but it's still real-world observations over the course of years.

Anyway, it's about immediate needs/wants being met.  A 20 year old interacts very differently with you if they're texting on their phone than if their phone just got cut off.  A parent suddenly doesn't have time to help with homework when they're trying to do the math that gets them to the end of the month (math they struggle with in the first place).

How to provide that?  I don't know.  Universal basic income?  Too liberal, right?  Raising the minimum wage?  Destroys all small businesses, I know, I know.  

Basically what it comes down to is that we have 2 options and maybe both will be required.  We're going to need one generation to be amazing and just "get it" and yearn to do better.  And we need to remove excuses from the generation before it by just inundating them with assistance.  I know, that's a dirty word, but instead of decades of assistance that keeps the same ghettos from the 70s still ghettos today, a one-gen only deluge of help might do it.  Might turn a corner.  Might move the needle in the right direction.  

I doubt any of you will agree, and that's fine.  I don't claim to have THE answer, it's just a shot in the dark.  But financially, this is superior to what's been going on.  It's like a contract with a football player - no one-year deal is a bad deal from the team's perspective, no matter how rich.  The problem that hamstrings teams are bad long-term deals.  We've had a bad long-term deal with poverty for decades.  Cutting a fat, virtual one-year deal is, at least, something different.