" Governor Rod Blagojevich deserves credit for wielding his veto pen as a meat cleaver to pare massive amounts of pork from the state budget. Republicans, given a seat at the table when the session went into overtime, deserve credit for holding the line on taxes. But the budget outcome is far from ideal. The seemingly arbitrary way the governor decided which pork to veto and which to leave intact calls into question the fundamental problems in the current budget process, which allows pork to be added in huge amounts with little or no public debate, transparency, or accountability. Moreover, while the state has billions of dollars in overdue bills, and already-high taxes, earmark cuts should be used to pay down bills in the name of fiscal responsibility, not to fund a massive executive-ordered expansion in government-run health care. The major victory in this budget outcome is that a tax hike was avoided. Just a few short months ago, the governor was pursuing the largest tax hike in the state’s history, a disastrously Gross Receipts Tax that would have sent businesses out of the state en masse. It also looked like the state might expand the sales tax to services, including business-to-business services, or raise the individual and corporate income taxes. On the spending side, taxpayers were only partially victorious. The enacted budget was stuffed with hundreds of millions of dollars in pork, and an overall spending increase of 8.5 percent, or $2.2 billion. Given the state’s ongoing difficulty paying its bills, such an increase in spending is excessive. The pork projects are not vetted through a process with transparency and accountability since only a few are specified in budget documents while others are hidden in agency budgets. Most remain completely unknown to the public until after they are enacted, and even many legislators have no opportunity to review these projects before they vote on them. Governor Blagojevich reduced pork spending significantly through his vetoes, but the process by which he decided what to cut and what to leave alone is not at all transparent, and appears to be arbitrary or perhaps politically motivated. Most projects sponsored by House Democrats and Senate Republicans, for instance, were vetoed, while House Republican and Senate Democrat pork appears to be left intact. With no debate and no Senate veto override vote, the earmarks left behind may be nothing more than favors, leaving only the pet projects of the governor and his allies in charge of state spending. Although a government shutdown was narrowly avoided, it’s clear that our state has a broken budget process that needs to be overhauled, especially if the governor is successful in unilaterally funding a massive new health care program for which he failed to gain legislative support. The breakdown in Springfield is not the fault of our largely well-meaning elected officials—it’s the result of a budget process that needs reform and transparency. All pork spending should be debated openly on its merits, subject to a public review period before any vote, and be accompanied by full disclosures indicating the rationale for the project, including a report of who benefits from it and what relationship they have with elected officials. Hidden earmarks must be stripped from agency budgets. We need to know where taxpayers dollars are going, and why, so that the public and our representatives can begin to set priorities in a more rational way. This year’s budget breakdown is an opportunity that fiscally responsible legislators should use to leverage these sorts of commonsense reforms. "