Short History, contd: The senator in calm, peaceful Wood Dale

Next stop for the Senator was far suburban Wood Dale, where he partnered with Rep. Kathleen Willis, of Addison, an Elmhurst College librarian recently elected for the 77th house district.

Twenty-five or so citizens turned up to hear them at Wood Dale City Hall On July 23, for the third and least contentious of the town hall meetings of 2013.

For instance, when questioned about the lack of urgency in solving the pension problem, the Senator was more circumspect than he’d been in a Wednesday Journal column, where he had put “crisis” in quotes. This time he called it a crisis “according to a tough standard,” namely “assuming pensioners live to 90” — which some of us consider a perfectly reasonable standard. By that standard, he said, the state had 32 years before the money would run out  — which some of us consider neither reasonable nor reassuring.

He also reminded his audience of the 2010 pension fix achieved by Democrats — a staple of his crisis-talk rebuttal — that raised retirement age and reduced benefits for new hires. But one by Republicans in 1995 — re-amortizing the shortfall — he called kicking the can down the road.

In the latter he was backed by the fiscally cautious Illinois Policy Institute, which in 2012 said there has been “perhaps no bigger fake reform” than this 1995 Republican fix, which allowed Gov. Jim Edgar and others “to stand tall” for having “solved” the problem.

“Even more” such fake reforms were then perpetrated by governors Blagojevich and Quinn, “along with their large Democrat majorities,” judged the institute, “including the issuance of pension obligation bonds and Tier 2 reforms [Ignoring decades of hiring] that fix nothing.”

The senator also repeated his complaints about newspaper coverage, a recurring motif. Matters are “misreported” or unreported, he said, as in coverage of the 2010 Democrats’ reform mentioned above (and . In this way do media outlets contribute to the state’s “reputational problem,” he said, presenting political “theater” while ignoring economic reality.