Subjects and find out enough about them to realize how complicated they are is reading. Because most of the subject you see on television doesnt have that kind of depth. The second thing, second reason why im so committed to children coming getting children reading, kids, if they dont, in my own area i say it sort of third grade to eighth grade, if we dont get them at that point and make them competent readers, how are they going to get through high school . How are they going to become, you know, good parents themselves . Whats going to happen to them after they get out of high school if they dont read well . I mean, basically, i dont want to say they are doomed but it really makes it hard and it limits their choices. You can watch this and other programs online at t. Org. At booktv. Org. You are watching cspan2 on booktv. On this Holiday Weekend on booktv on cspan2, here some of the programs to look for. For more information visit us online. Booktv, television for serious readers. James nowlan and j. Thomas johnson talk about their book, fixing illinois politics and policy in the prairie state during the 2014 Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest held annually in the city. This 45 and program is next on booktv. It thank you very much for joining us today. I cant think of the more appropriate discussion in 2014, an election year, then to the en conversation with you as well a the authors of the book, fixing illinois. Quite frankly theres a book coming out i believe on tuesday ll Hillary Clinton called hard choices in front of the might of been a more appropriate title given the problems that illinois faces. But id like to introduce theri authors. On my far right is j. Thomas johnson. N. S appointed president of the Taxpayers Federation of illinois in 2006. And he became president emeritus elected january of last year. Is a former director of the illinois departmentjanu of reve. He served as an original member and later became the chairman o the illinois gaming board. Tom johnson. Ohnson. [applause] and to my direct right isor d goves nowlan. Jim was a senior agent for three governors, president of countyn conditions which publishes newspapers in central and lower, the vice chair of the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission which oversees the ethics, and ethics training of 120,000 state of the little employees. He was elected to the only house of representatives in 1968 at ae the age of 26. Four years later, then governor Richard Ogilvie tapped jim to b his running mate as the republican candidate for republic lieutenant governor. While, please, james nowlan. [applause] now, i read this n encourage you to do so if you care about the future of illinois. Given what these gentlemen do in the book, it is series of recommendations or basically just conversation points. I had tom and jim on my radio show on wgn earlier today called the sunday spin and one of the questions i had was given all of the problems in the state of illinois, their recommendations only total 98. You couldnt get to 100 . And by the end of the show we did get to 100. I want to address, and something i learned from talking to them both, the last chapter of the book is entitled corruption an enduring tradition. And you explained you made it the last chapter of the book for a reason. Yeah, we believe in fact a gallop poll did a poll on trust in government and illinois ranked next to last in terms of Citizens Trust in government. Corresponding to that was also a poll question asked if you could would you move from your state. And illinois ranked first in that regard or last. And they are tied hand in hand. We believe the basic need in fixing illinois is to address our corruption and ethics in Illinois State government and local government as well. And jim had a prospective on that coming from a slight different angle. There is a cost to corruption we found in a survey of Illinois Development executives 2 3rds said the corruption effected somewhat or a great deal efforts to recruit business to come into the state of illinois. So it is a serious problem not only for the perception but in a sense in a reality of recruiting business in the state of illinois. But when you you have almost what i would say is an x ex acceptance of corruption. I wonder if there is an acceptance among people there is always going to be some level of corruption and at least maybe we be we can try to find people with the bar low so tolerance is accepted. I was going to note i teach american politics at the university of illinois, or used it, and each course i would give an exercise to students, most seniors headed for law school, and in this exercise, i said your older brother has been charged with a serious dui. He is in his first year out of college, must have a car to do the job. His wife is at home pregnant with their first child. And the savvy lawyer for the older brother says look, i am confidant i can get this case dismissed if you will provide me 1,000 in cash beyond my fee and the question the older brother asks the younger sibling anonymously is should he go for it or reject the idea. And in 78 courses in which i did the exercise, 2 3rd of the students said go for it. Gives you a sense of what i consider a culture of corruption that too many of us in illinois feel we should take advantage of government because that is what everybody else does. What do we do about this . We know it is an enduring tradition. But what changes that kind of mentality . I think we need a take a bold initiative. We have passed nibbling around the edges ethic reform legislation in illinois but Nothing Specific with strong penalties. If we take on the challenge we want to fix illinois, we have to take bold initiatives. And one of those areas we need to do that in is in the area of ethics and corruption. Legislation that people look at and say wow is what i mean. Did you see what they are doing in illinois . Jim made a point that, you know, it used to be cigarette smoking was standard for young people. Now it is no longer a standard vice. Drinking and driving and so forth was okay. It is no longer acceptable in our culture. Corruption can be no longer acceptable. And ethics lapse can no longerby acceptable. If we create a structure that that is the messening the public demands of their officials maybe we can have the same level of success on this area as we have in cigarette smoking and in driving while intoxicated. So we can do it. We just have to embrace it and say this is what we need to do to address the problems that this state faces. Give the mere suggestion number 99. We have 98 suggestions in this book. We invite people to add another 99. You know, our email are in the book. Just send us a great idea. This was my 99th. Eliminate all public pension for all elected officials in the state of illinois. Not civil severants and career employees but elected officials. Why do i say that . Pensions are a benefit for a professional core of longterm employees and that is what what elected officials are. I am so tired of reading in tth the Chicago Tribune about a public official committed a crime, pled guilty and it took a year half so they drew pension the whole time before sentences. If we eliminated that and gave every public official a 5 raise and said contribute that to your ira you are no longer covered by public pensions. That is not what they were created for. It is for longterm professional employment. Get rid of it. Why have that cloud hanging over public official because 25 have ethical lapses and paint ugly pictures for all of the servants. Jim, you note the history of smoking and drinking and driving and that seems like a generational kind of change. One of the recommendations, jim, in the book is about teaching ethics as part of high school curriculum. We require two years of social science in the high school curriculum. Indiana requires three and i think that is more typical in illinois. I think one should be devoted to civics or American Government at least and that clearly has elements about ethical behavior should be part of that correspondence work. We touched on this earlier today about education and things like that and this really goes to one of the early chapters in the book where you talk about the issue of renalism in illinois. And you have the political differences and most recently in this state the issue of carrying a concealed firearm in public. And the issue of down state illinois, the six counties outside of the chicago area, and truly then in chicago and more urbanized area, the urban areas are more supportive of gun control and down states more supportive of gun rights. And illinois under a court order was able to come up with the law thatoo make illinois the last state in the country that leg legalized the concealed carry of firearms. And you made a comparison of texas. Dont mess with texas. Texas is its own country for anyone who hasnt been there. But in illinois there is diversity. And that has consequences. The suburbs of chicago is looked at as one state and look at down state, lack of growth, declining economy, fewer educational choices and also link that to come neighborhoods in chicago. I think many parts of depleted rural down state illinois have a great deal in common with the struggling neighborhoods in the city of chicago but they dont realize the commonalities they face. You talked about regionalism and how it can be reversed. We have two regions. The metro area and then rest of the state. Maybe the northeastern part of the region has identified itself as a metroplex and one of the great city areas of the world. And the rest of the state lost who they are. What are their goals, dreams and aspirations. How do they tie themselves to chicago . Or will they tie themselves to chicago . We need to edge educate them about the fact their livelihood is dependent on this area. Many of the things produced in illinois are consumed by people in the area. How do we respect different traditi traditions when it comes to regional areas and we need to help the public understand how we are interconnected and the differences and that suggest the great met met metropolitan does a great of planning and put out broader Economic Development studies of the metro area. But illinois as a state is lost in all of that because it is the poor cousin to the metropolitan area. We dont do longterm thinking at the state level. There is no planning unit in the budget or civics units on a statewide bases that think about the problems and issues related to regionalism. We need to do more of that. Or begin to do that. Lets go back and do the overview here. Illinois is a state facing many challenges. If we are not at the Tipping Point we may have tipped over already. Most of those challenges, basically are financial challenges and those kind of affect Economic Issues about the we talked about corruption but the states economy and businesses that might look to come to illinois are looking for a financial certainty and so you have a state with a 100 billion unfunded pension liability. We have a law that is passed but it is being challenged in the court. Lets take that off the table, though. You have, we just saw lawmakers left springfield and passed a 35. 7 billion budget even though there is not revenue there to sustain the budget and there is a budget balance requirement in the constitution. One thing noted in the book is we have a finance structural imbalance in what the state takes in, how it takes it in and what it delivers. How do we fix that mess . We have this longterm planning. How do we tell the people how we will take care of the pension problem . How do we tell businesses looking to invest in the state this problem is going to be managed . On the revenue side of the fiscal challenges, our tax structu structure depends on narrowbase taxes in the area of sales tax which is the primary revenue of state government. We tax goods at very high rates and we dont tax services at all. In the income tax area, we dont tax retirement income. We give a big property tax credit. Both of them grow faster than the income tax base. So what we structured in illinois from a tax perspective is what i call an anemic tax structure. It doesnt grow with the economy and slower to growth. And we have to knowledge that we need fix that. And in our book we proposed various ways to do that. Broadening the base of our tax structure. Lowering the rates and with that broad n based we will get more Revenue Growth than in the current structure. We need to have have long term vision of our fiscal challenges and how we will address them. If we do that, we will gain the confidence that we have a longterm plan and we build the faith in the ability to manage the fiscal challenges. And you note fax fairness. We have the effort it will be an advisory referendum about a millionaires tax. And we had talk about a graduated tax. Even the sales tax has a fairness question there. Absolutely. Me perspective is get the tax base first before you decide the rate structure you put on top of it. We dont tax retirement income. The federal does. But we tax unemployment compensation. What the policy rational for that . The Fastest Growing potential income in this country is retirement and if you exclude that the base grows slowly. Politically the rational is seniors dont like paying taxes. I am a senior. I paid them all of my life and i have an obligation to pay them. We need to get the base right. And when we do i think the tax system will be fair moreso than a graduated tax rate on a base that is the wrong tax base. In proposing these, you are not proposing them as revenue n increases . No goodness no. We think we met our maximum tax burden in this state. Broaden basis produces lower tax rate. We need to lower the tax rate and expand the base so it is more responsive and grow with the economy rather than slower than the economy. Lets talk about the spending side, jim. What solid steps you talk about medicaid spending and there is one of those parts of structural imbalance, even though the state gets a match from the federal government, but the inflationary increases in Health Care Spending we will see what the Affordable Care act does to that in the future but that helped drive this kind of exponential growth in the state. I think the biggest challenge in the book is medicaid spending and how to bring the rate of increase for medicaid spending closer to that to the rate of inflation or growth in the revenue system. We make several proposals that might not stand the test of the waver process in the federal government, but one is from the very conservative Illinois Policy Institute which has suggested that if we put most of the medicaid enrollees on private system basically a voucher system . It might be less expensive than the fee for service we have now. Another area in which i think the state of illinois shouldnt be more aggressive is that of the rate of reimbursement to the state of illinois which is the lowest rate among of them and that is 50 federal match to 50 state spending. Several states around us have lower rates of unemployment than we do but are reimbursed at 63 rather than the 50 we are reimbursed at. If it was 57 by the federal government, we would save about a billion in state revenue we could apply to other purposes. So i think the illinois delegati delegation, the congress, should work on this with other members of congress because several states like illinois are being shorted. One thing that every politician says is education is my top priority. The illinois constitution says the state shall have the primary obligation for funding public schools. We know as a result of the Supreme Court decision that that was a goal and not a fact. We increasingly see the property tax burden going up as a support mechanisms for public schools. We talk about tax reform and then you look at a property tax which is basically based on an 18th century model of wealth. What do we to do reduce spending, make a equitable, and try not to make it the quality of your school depends on your zip code in the state of illinois. Lots of ideas. Florida has 150 School Districts. Virginia has about the same number. Indiana basically the School District is the size of a county. We have 893 School Districts in the state of illinois. Many of them are poor. Many of them are very wealthy. The wealthy do not want to share with the poor. They can tax themselves because they often have a high commercial and Industrial Base and they can produce far in access of the revenue flow of each student. We need to look at how we fund k12 education not only from the state level but the local tax resources as well. We also suggest that in order to get a better product out of our k12 education system, we need to lengthen the school here. And somebody asked the question where are you going to get the money for that and my First Response was reallocate resources. I sounded like a politician and she said that is always the answer you get. Further in the book we said maybe we should look at how we Fund Higher Education and we should eliminate the appropriate funds to universities. A voucher of Higher Education in the state of illinois . I dont think we agree on this totally. I see transferring it to a voucher as you are saying. So as to make Higher Education, which is in great turmoil right now, and make it more of a market in which the students march to the institutions thank you will provide them the best value and outcome. Does anybody do that now . In some states, the public universities, i think pennsylvania is one of them that has very little direct appropriates from the institution. But the dollars follow the needbased students. We do that now with the illinois financial assistant program. We do direct appropriates for public university. How many students do you have in the classroom is asked but in the four year programs we dont ask that. We think more accountability occur when the dollars follow the students rather than direct appropriates to the school. Does that change the mission of some of these public universities in trying to cater to a more freemarket based approach . It undoubtedally woul