Guiding Illinois Republican state lawmakers in budget reform

This column has been exasperated for many years now with the flat-line GOP caucuses in our state house and senate. There have been many voices calling on our elected Illinois Republican legislators to offer up an alternative plan to the Democrats’ tax tax, spend spend, borrow borrow – so far to no avail.

Even our Illinois Republican Party state platform includes this:

“We call on the Republican delegations in both the Illinois House and the Illinois Senate to present an alternative budget, reflecting our principles, to engender debate on spending and to move along the process of enacting a budget…”

Several years ago we posted a piece about how fiscally responsible states were preparing their budgets. Here are a few of the links we presented then:

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=19354

http://www.effwa.org/main/article.php?article_id=12&number=30

http://www.effwa.org/main/article.php?article_id=827&number=30

http://www.effwa.org/budget_taxes/pog.php

http://www.effwa.org/main/article.php?article_id=718&number=30

Yesterday, the National Center for Policy Reform sent out this post – a “toolkit” worth using by our own Republican legislators in Illinois:

Guiding State Lawmakers in Budget Reform

Most legislative “fixes” aimed at mending state structural deficits created by overspending have merely postponed or obscured the problems, rather than address them directly, says the Reason Foundation.

In response, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Reason Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Washington Policy Center, Evergreen Freedom Foundation and State Budget Solutions have created the State Budget Reform Toolkit.

The Toolkit seeks to guide policymakers in prioritizing and more efficiently delivering core government services through advancing Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty.

Topics covered in the State Budget Reform Toolkit include:

  • Priority-based budgeting/budgeting for outcomes.
  • State pension reform.
  • Privatization and competitive contracting.
  • State tax and spending limitations.
  • Balanced budget requirements.
  • State hiring freezes.
  • Restructuring state retiree health care plans.
  • Employee incentive/gainsharing programs.

For text:

http://reason.org/news/show/state-budget-reform-toolkit

For study:

http://www.alec.org/toolkit

For more on State and Local Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=40

There are so many positive examples to follow there isn’t any excuse for inaction. They can be found in other states and from the many free market think tanks from coast to coast.

Your guess is as good as mine as to why we still aren’t seeing any constructive action from our GOP General Assembly caucuses.

© John Biver