Brady’s Budget Plan: Eat the Seed Corn

While those of us who live in the city may sometimes forget it, Illinois is a great corn producing state.  And that’s one reason why Illinois voters are way too smart to fall for Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady’s “plan” to address the state’s fiscal woes.

Before selling a season’s corn harvest, a conscientious grower sets aside some seed for the next season’s sowing.  A good farmer plans for the future because he or she knows that, no matter what happens today, tomorrow always comes.  If you sow nothing now, you’ll reap nothing later.

Bill Brady has apparently never farmed corn, and his lack of foresight is on display in his imprudent budget proposal. 

Illinois has a long-term structural deficit that needs to be addressed.  That’s beyond dispute, but Brady’s plan fails to posit a responsible strategy.  Brady claims that he will slash state expenditures by 10 percent next year, but his planned cuts lack coherency and fail to meaningfully address the institutional factors that created the budget crisis in the first place.

Brady’s proposal is essentially a short-term “across-the-board” spending cut.  He doesn’t bother, however, setting forth any programmatic priorities or outlining his vision for the state’s fiscal future beyond the next appropriations cycle.  As the Springfield State Journal Register put it: “If state finances were a house, this amounts to patching holes in the roof when it rains while ignoring the bulging foundation walls in the basement.” 

Even Brady’s fellow Republicans are unwilling to defend his proposal.  Former Governor Jim Edgar called Brady’s plan "simplistic" and "naïve."

What’s worse, Brady’s proposal risks actually deepening the state’s problems by turning a fiscal crisis into a generational calamity.  At their core, Brady’s suggested cuts would mean deep reductions is state spending on education, an area where Illinois currently expends much of its revenue—last year, over 30 percent of appropriations from the state’s General Revenue Fund went to support schools and higher education.  By cutting the heart out of the state’s already fragile education system, the Brady Plan would make Illinois’s financial future worse, not better.

As anyone who has ever managed the household finances can tell you, not all spending is created equal.  Some spending is a luxury (i.e. premium cable) and some spending is a necessity (i.e. medicine).   Other spending is an investment that pays back dividends over the long run.  That kind of spending is like seed corn.  It gives back its value many times over when it is given time to grow.  Brady’s plan, however, lacks this common-sense recognition.  It skips the step of prioritizing critical state programs and fails to recognize that education spending is the state’s most important economic investment. 

Simply put, today’s students are tomorrow’s taxpayers.  When properly funded and administered, good schools are engines of economic development.  Better educational opportunities--from pre-kindergarten to the university--attract people to a state and help grow the next generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, and innovators.  Those people, in turn, bolster the state’s long-term economic competitiveness and drive its future revenues (It’s not a coincidence that Silicon Valley is built around Stanford University or that the Research Triangle grew up between Duke University and the University of North Carolina). 

By contrast, depriving our youth of meaningful educational opportunities will end up costing the state more in the long run . . . in unemployment, in lost economic activity, and in increased pressure on the criminal justice system.

Building and maintaining great schools is good for Illinois.  The money we invest today preparing our children for tomorrow’s challenges will contribute to our long-term civic, intellectual, and economic strength.  It is money well spent.  Brady, however, just fails to see it that way. 

The economic and intellectual future of Illinois should not suffer because of Brady’s naïveté.  Our kids, the seeds of our future, are far too important.  For that reason, this November, Illinois voters should reject Brady and his reckless plan to sell the future of our state and our students short.