The spring 2012 legislative session has now begun. Between now and the end of May, the General Assembly will be making key decisions about a variety of issues that will have a significant impact on the quality of life in Illinois. Atop the list of priorities, of course, is our continuing efforts to right the state's still-dire fiscal position.

This includes not only the writing of the Fiscal Year 2013 budget, but also the needed reforms to some of the programs whose rapid growth has caused a great portion of our fiscal imbalance, most notably our public pension systems and the Medicaid program.  These steps will not be easy or painless, but they are necessary to ensure the long-term stability of our economy, our workforce, and our health care system.

I am always eager to hear your thoughts, comments, and questions.  You can contact me on this page.  You can also follow my legislative activity in Springfield online, by looking at the list of bills I've introduced here or by checking in on the activity of the committees I serve on here.  It is an honor to serve you and I hope to hear from you soon!

Last night, I finally read The Big Short, Michael Lewis's book about activities in the mortgage and securities markets leading up to the financial crisis of 2008.  My first reaction was anger -- anger that so many people had made crazy and amoral decisions that so devastated the global economy, and that many of them had actually been fabulously rewarded for doing so.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that the issue wasn't so much that bad people knowingly behaved in venal ways.  Rather, people were quick to follow enormously perverse short-term incentives, and completely blind to the broader context they were operating in.

Following short-term incentives and ignoring the big picture is a recipe for getting into enormous trouble, and few entities can better attest to that reality than the State of Illinois.  It is my hope that when we look back on this era a decade from now, we will view 2011 as the year that Illinois began to get past perverse incentives and think about the long term:

• We built a budget by realistically estimating revenue and trying to allocate available funds to the most critical priorities, while avoiding some of the most egregious accounting gimmicks that had plagued past budgets.
• We made the full payment into our pension funds, without borrowing, skipping, or obfuscating.
• We began to think strategically about economic growth, from workers' compensation to the corporate tax structure to alignment between our education systems and real workforce needs.

Goodness knows we haven't addressed any of these big issues in a perfect or definitive way -- and it's important to acknowledge that errors and missteps, particularly in budget decisions, have terrible human consequences.  But these are enormous and difficult areas where Illinois needed to make tremendous changes in its basic approach, and if 2011 represents the first of many steps toward the implementation of those tremendous changes, then a decade from now we'll be able to look back proudly on this moment, from a vantage point of broadly shared prosperity and economic security.

Making the needed changes will take time, and it will require that elected leaders rise above some of the short-term incentives that so often point us in the wrong direction.  Maybe even more importantly, we'll need to avoid thinking in little self-interested silos and instead recognize that big economic decisions interact with one another and thus require a broad and comprehensive vision.

It's a tall order, but I think we're up to it, and that's why I'm optimistic about our future.  And I guess now I know my resolution for 2012.

Happy New Year!