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ICYMI: Illinois is the sick man of America; will Bruce Rauner save it?

The following is an excerpt from Investor’s Business Daily:

Illinois is America's biggest basket case: Over $150 billion in unfunded retirement liabilities. The worst overall fiscal condition of any state. Two governors and a raft of other public officials sent to prison. Corruption that costs every citizen more than $1,300 a year.



Job growth that trails all surrounding states. The slow-motion liquidation of Downstate's manufacturing economy. Over 300,000 more people fleeing the state just since 2010.

The venal and bankrupt political class of both parties created this toxic mess. Those who benefited served as enablers, including public employees, unions and the big business interests who always seemed to cut a better side deal of subsidies for themselves.

Enter Bruce Rauner… with a promise to shake up Springfield and start fundamentally reforming the state.

While Rauner and everybody else knows that higher taxes are required to pay off Illinois' Mount Everest of debt, he has refused to countenance more taxes without reform first — reform that Democrats oppose.

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One would think this would pressure the state's legacy Democratic leadership, which presided over creating much of the current mess, to get on board with reform.

Michael Madigan has all but ruled the state with an iron fist since becoming speaker of the Illinois House in 1983. Virtually every bad decision since happened with his approval.

But in some bizarre inversion, Rauner is the one under pressure to fold and return to business-as-usual politics in Illinois.

Some, especially on the left, may strongly dislike Rauner's proposals, but he's the only chance at reform Illinois has.

The choice isn't between Rauner and some imaginary progressive utopia. It's between Rauner's reforms and more Madigan misrule.

That's an easy choice to make.

Illinois can't afford any more Madigan-Cullerton style business as usual.

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