Will Gov. Pritzker ever learn? Probably not.
“The years 2010 through 2019 will go down in Illinois history as a decade of public policy failure and economic decline,” writes Adam Schuster of the Illinois Policy Institute in a recent report entitled Illinois Forward. “High fixed costs for pensions and government worker health care have prevented the state from balancing its budget in any year since 2001,” Schuster laments. “Since the Great Recession in 2008, the state’s fiscal imbalance has grown progressively worse.”
Progressively worse? That’s for sure. No pun intended, presumably, but the phrasing is certainly apt, insofar as progressive policies always make things worse. Why? Because they’re not really progressive, but regressive. Progressives only call themselves and their policies progressive to make themselves and those policies look good and sound good.
If progressives truly were progressive, they’d stop doing all the things they do that make life progressively worse for everyone but them.
“We all want progress,” C.S. Lewis once observed, “but, if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
Is that what self-styled progressives do when confronted with the calamitous results of their ill-conceived and demonstrably ineffective policies? Do they turn around and go back in the other direction? No, of course they don’t. That would require the intelligence to recognize their mistakes and the humility to admit them, two qualities they simply do not possess.
So, what do they do instead? They double down on stupid.
Take J.B. Pritzker, for instance. Will he ever recognize and admit that his whole approach to state government budgeting is wrong and that he needs to go in the other direction?
No, he’ll just double down on stupid: keep raising taxes, keep promoting the exodus of Illinoisans and the erosion of our tax base, and so on, ad infinitum.
Pritzker could pick up a copy of Illinois Forward and consider ideas that have proven effective for other states, but you know he won’t.