Focus on budget

If you had your druthers, which would you rather see the Illinois General Assembly do in 2012: Approve a couple of hundred more new laws, or focus all its energy on solving Illinois’ dreadful financial problems?

We think the legislature should take care of first things first and put the state’s financial house in order.

That being said, we propose state lawmakers put off making any more new laws until they make significant headway toward balancing the state budget, paying off a multibillion-dollar backlog of bills, and dealing with the state’s multibillion-dollar debt.

The problems are extreme.

Extreme measures are needed to deal with them.

To a legislator, putting a moratorium on introducing and adopting new laws – even for just a year – would seem extreme.

However, to most average Illinoisans, it would not seem extreme at all, but a real blessing.

More than 200 new laws took effect in Illinois with the start of the new year. We detailed the majority of them on www.morrisdailyherald.com on New Year’s Day. Some of the new laws represent good ideas, but most are not absolutely crucial to the continued health and well-being of Illinoisans. The laws likely could have been put off a year or even more.

The same goes for laws that took effect on previous New Year’s Days. In 2011, more than 190 new laws took effect; in 2010, 273; in 2009, 112. These new laws represent hours and hours of committee hearings, testimony, research, debates and roll-call votes.

Additionally, there are dozens, scores or even hundreds of bills that never make it. Those legislative efforts eat up precious time.

Had lawmakers freed themselves from their obsession with approving myriad laws that tell the rest of us what to do, maybe they could have made real progress on Illinois’ financial problems.

Those problems threaten real people, like the vendors who don’t get paid by the state for months on end, or nursing homes and social service agencies whose payments are late, or the school districts whose transportation budgets continue to be cut.

Illinois needs to get a real handle on how it spends tax dollars and what areas could be trimmed or eliminated. A major audit of expenses, done in a bipartisan manner, would be a good way to gather that information.