Reality Rauner vs. Fantasy Rauner

Three months into Bruce Rauner’s governorship, I’m beginning to see two distinct sides to the new chief executive.

One is the numbers guy. This is the private equity deal-maker who made a fortune by analyzing businesses, looking at their bottom lines, setting goals and charging forward to achieve them.

“I’ve been involved in a lot of turnarounds,” Rauner told the Wall Strett Journal in March. “A key lesson in a turnaround is go big, go strong, go fast early. You don’t wait around; you don’t think about it; you don’t wonder.”

Then there is the political side of Rauner. Here, the governor seems to have no use for the rational analysis that guided his business career.

Take Rauner’s new pension-reform proposal. Rauner proposed in his budget address placing all public employees into a reduced-benefit pension plan that was created in 2010 and applies to workers hired as of Jan. 1, 2011. He made this proposal as if blissfully unaware of (A) the political wrangling that went into the current pension-reform law and (B) the lawsuit that may throw the whole thing out.

Perhaps this is all part of the “you don’t think about it” philosophy. Then Rauner lays out a budget that contains $2.2 billion in savings from his plan.

But won’t this end up in court for 18 months like the current law? No, Rauner said, because it would be preceded by a constitutional amendment to remove pension protection language from the constitution.

The earliest such an amendment could go into effect is Jan. 1, 2017. That’s assuming three-fifths majorities of the House and Senate place it on the November 2016 ballot and voters approve giving politicians authority to freely do what they please with the pensions of hundreds of thousands of current and retired teachers and other public employees.

Keep in mind that these are the same voters who elected Rauner with 50.3 percent of the vote yet also said they approved of an immediate $10 minimum wage and a 3 percent tax on millionaires with 66.7 and 63.6 percent of the vote, respectively. If those numbers are any gauge, and I think they’re a pretty good one, I’d say there’s a fairly vast philosophical chasm between Rauner and the electorate as a whole.

By that measure, the political chances for his pension plan seem slim. Two suburban Democrats, Sen. Dan Biss of Evanston and Rep. Elaine Nekritz of Northbrook, held a press conference at the Capitol on Tuesday and said they think the governor’s plan might also violate federal law. Biss called Rauner’s savings an “absolute fantasy.”

Yet no sooner had Biss and Nekritz finished their critique of Rauner’s pie-in-the-sky pension plan than a Senate committee witnessed the other side of Rauner.

The topic was what Democrats have dubbed the “Good Friday Massacre” — $26 million in social service cuts issued April 3. Rauner made the cuts under authority granted him in two emergency budget bills passed a week earlier with help from Democrats. The Dems voted for the bills believing programs named in them would be protected.

Democrats at Tuesday’s committee believed Rauner had double-crossed them. Then Tim Nuding, Rauner’s budget director, read from his own testimony last month that warned of possible cuts if savings didn’t add up.

The hearing featured emotional testimony from a mother of two autistic children who, clearly, was crushed at the prospect of losing the one resource that gave her hope for her kids overcoming their disabilities.

In past years, lawmakers simply would have pushed this year’s expenses into next year. This fantasy budgeting built $7 billion in unpaid bills and an estimated $6 billion shortfall for the FY 2016 budget.

Rauner was not willing to engage in this tried-and-true bad budgeting practice. It didn’t earn Rauner popularity from Democrats, but his credibility is intact.

If Rauner values that credibility, he’ll bring the same tough, rational, by-the-numbers discipline to the 2016 budget battle of the next seven weeks. If he shows up at the bargaining table with a budget built on $2.2 billion in phantom savings from a plan with roughly zero chance of becoming reality, he’ll usher in a whole new era of fantasy budgeting.

Matt Dietrich is executive editor of Reboot Illinois, where a longer version of this column is posted.