RichardWanke.Com

Promoting Quinn these days is being optimistic about the best of a lot of much worse evils.  Quinn may be a bit of a bungler, but at least he solidly recognizes that IL is virtually broke and desperately needs to do two things at the same time: staunch it’s fiscal bleeding, and innovate to create new sources of revenue. Quinn isn’t afraid to say that taxes need to be raised; he has said that from the beginning of his term as Governor, but he has not been able to persuade other legislators to go along with him on this.

His opponent, Bill Brady, sees only one side of the equation: cut, cut, cut! Exactly where Brady thinks he can cut state services any further and still leave some services in place is unknown. Anyone working in state government knows that it has been already cut to the bone. Further cuts won’t generate much more in savings.

Brady’s website sound-bites on his plan to solve the state’s fiscal crisis are so simplistic they make apparent lots of contradictions: Brady will cut 10% from the overall state budget and somehow leave “essential” services untouched. A 10% cut will enable him to balance the budget without more”crippling borrowing”. (If only 10% could accomplish this, it would already have been done) Of course, Brady is already at the same time also out there floating the idea of borrowing $50 million to pay the pension obligation. Brady won’t ever raise taxes and he’ll ensure that a “supermajority” is required to raise any taxes, so he’ll paint the state into a corner where it can’t reach behind it to raise it’s traditional source of revenue at the same time that Brady is not going to come up with  new sources of revenue, since he has no ideas now. And, Brady will kick the last leg the state has standing by privatizing the state employee pensions of any state employee stupid enough to stay around to work twice as hard for much less. That will no doubt improve public safety as in the situation with the state prisons and correctional staff which are already struggling to maintain facilities and operations with budget cutbacks.

Brady has changed his tune several times due to his “Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome”, such as backing off his call to reduce the state’s minimum wage, and some of his earlier proclamations. If you give him some close scrutiny, you find he is not very friendly to your average, struggling, Illinois worker, and ultra-conservative in many of his convictions. Enough of his ultra-conservative views have emerged in this last month to cause voters to begin to doubt him.

We consumers are in serious trouble here. Election polls first showed Quinn behind Brady in the race for Governor. Quinn appeared to close the gap for a short while, but now in the past week there is a new poll showing Brady 9 points ahead of Quinn with 22% of the electorate undecided.

We urge everyone with any ounce of sense to get out an vote for Quinn, because we are both repulsed and scared by the nature of Brady’s “convictions”.  If you haven’t read any of the above information, or looked at the Brady website, or other articles, we urge you to do so and find out about just how distasteful Brady seems. People incarcerated in IL state prisons are also beginning to realize that a Brady win will be a serious loss for them. It will certainly do away with any chance at all for an “Early Release” program down the road, and at worst, may even do away with the reinstatement of MGT or anything else to help them out.