* Phil Kadner lays out where he thinks the governor’s proposed tax hike is going…

There is a hole in the state budget of about $13 billion.

But Quinn doesn’t have to cut the education budget.

He could cut anywhere he wants, including the jobs of all of his staff members.

However, in this game of pretend, we have to believe that the cuts must come from education, because that’s going to get a lot of people angry.

Teachers are already being notified that they might not have jobs next year.

The more people who are mad, the greater the pressure on legislators to pass a tax increase. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

Close your eyes now, click your heels together and say, “I’m not in Illinois any more.”

Because public pressure doesn’t work in Springfield.

The lawmakers will ignore the governor, put together their own spending plan and pass a six-month budget to get through November.

Um, Phil, if public pressure didn’t work in Springfield, they’d double the income tax rate. Just saying, man. Also, Kadner skipped over the tax hike for education in the late 1980s in his history of education funding.

* The Southern says we need “leadership” without actually endorsing a specific idea…

We’re not budget experts. We don’t know if the Quinn tax-increase plan is the best way to go. It does seem unlikely a state with a total payroll of around $3 billion is going to simply cut its way into the black.

What we do know is that we are sick of politics trumping policy; incumbency trumping ideals; partisanship trumping planning.

There was a time, at least it seems, when we elected people to make hard decisions, to lead.

But something has changed. Everyone wants everything, but no one wants to pay for it … or even step forward and say no. As polling by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute shows, Illinoisans overwhelmingly favor cuts in state spending. But asked to identify what they’d accept in cuts, the numbers just don’t add up.

Illinois is in a sorry state. Some would say it is a sorry state.

Trouble is, you can’t lead if nobody will follow, and it’s pretty tough to lead if even the editorial boards with tons of state facilities, a huge university and a big community college in their coverage area are too timid to step up. Leadership isn’t just top down. While I am on record numerous times arguing for a tax hike, I can easily see why so few would want to vote for it this year.

The hard truth is that every major tax hike passed in this state for the past 40 years has been done in a bipartisan manner. Every, single one. If the minority party won’t play ball, then the issue becomes simply too hot to deal with for the majority. It’s as simple as that.

Several Republicans voted for the driver fee increases to fund the capital bill last year, and you barely hear a word about that these days. The reason is because it was passed on a bipartisan vote. Refusing to vote for an income tax hike on their own may make the Democrats cowards in some eyes, but to them they’re just being politically smart. Only people with some sort of mental issues want to commit suicide.

* The Southtown Star continues in this vein, sputtering about do-nothing legislators while the budget burns…

Sen. Maggie Crotty recently passed a vital bill - regulating funeral processions. A current Illinois ban on the slaughter of horses for human consumption would be lifted under a proposal from Rep. Jim Sacia. Another measure would allow active duty soldiers home on leave to hunt or fish without a license under a proposal by Rep. Jack Franks. Illinoisians under the age of 18 would be prohibited from buying caffeinated pop and other drinks containing taurine or guarana under a measure proposed by Rep. Louis Arroyo.

If the Dems have lost the Southtown, they are in big trouble.

* My syndicated newspaper column looks at the budget and ahead at November. The last section of the piece is something we haven’t really talked about here..

Like all of the budgets proposed by governors in the past few years, Gov. Pat Quinn’s spending outline last week was an almost complete fantasy. It has pretty much zero chance of surviving intact and will have to be tossed out and substantially reworked before the session ends.

Unless the school interests can pull off a legislative miracle during an anti-incumbent election year, Quinn’s proposed one percentage point tax increase to prevent $1.3 billion in school funding cuts and pay another $1.5 billion in overdue bills to schools and universities is deader than a rock on a stump. House Speaker Michael Madigan made that pretty darned clear right after the speech.

Asked what he would do if the Republicans refused to cooperate on the budget, Madigan said his Democratic majority would have to go it alone. Asked if that meant he’d go it alone on a tax hike, he pointedly said, “No.”

A few minutes later, appearing on public television’s “Illinois Lawmakers” program, Madigan said, “Let’s be straightforward about this. The people of America, the people of Illinois, they don’t want tax increases. They’re hurting.”

Madigan then praised the governor for having the courage to propose a tax hike in this climate, but quickly added: “That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

Shortly afterward, Senate President John Cullerton made it crystal clear that his chamber would not take the lead on a tax hike. House GOP Leader Tom Cross indicated that he still has the hammer down on his members who might be amenable to a tax hike. “It’s not going to happen,” said Senate GOP Leader Christine Radogno.

Just like that, the whole thing was dead before Quinn’s voice had stopped echoing in the House chambers.

In a different year, the theory behind Quinn’s tax hike gambit wouldn’t be bad.

People despise Illinois government these days - for good reason - so a tax increase for state operations is pretty much out of the question. Most people do like their local schools, parents like their kids’ teachers, and property tax payers are fed up with constant increases. Using a tax hike to “save” the schools is far easier to do than justifying a tax hike to make more pension payments to state employees, or fund a state system widely derided as incompetent and corrupt.

But anybody who takes the time to look at this proposal knows it’s just too obvious of a setup. Gov. Quinn didn’t propose any cuts at all to the State Board of Education’s bureaucracy. Instead, the slashes were all classroom-related. And education took well over half of all the cuts Quinn proposed, despite being only about a third of the budget.

Rather than making a serious attempt to balance the budget in a reasonable, even-handed manner, the Quinn administration went far out of its way to strike maximum fear into the populace. The real motivation behind this gambit is just way too overt to be believable.

And does anybody really believe that Quinn will actually stick to his guns? Doubtful. The governor threatened a doomsday for social service providers last year and then blinked when his deadline approached. He’s an old-school, compassionate liberal. Everybody knows he doesn’t want to make these cuts and will do just about anything to avoid them.

There are those in the administration who say the tax-hike-for-schools template can be used after the November election (assuming Quinn wins), when legislators feel safer about voting for it. The proposal, the insiders say, is more of a road map for the future than a plan to be implemented this spring.

The schools tax hike, they say, is also a way to lessen the pain of the inevitable Republican charge that the Democrats are not-so-secretly planning to raise taxes once they’re reinstalled in power in November. But if the “secret” plan is to raise taxes for schools and local governments, that might mitigate the political damage by giving Quinn a way to dodge claims on the campaign trail that he wants to raise taxes to prop up the bureaucracy. The polling numbers are turning so bad on taxes right now that Quinn needed to do something to save his political skin without totally abandoning his principles.

That’s all well and good and a dandy little political theory. In the meantime, the state is $13 billion in the red and still lacking a real plan to tackle it.

* Related…

* Lawmakers get eviction notices: The state’s money problems are so bad that lawmakers are getting eviction notices and calls from collection agencies about their offices back home.

* Where can Quinn get $5B?

* Quinn’s budget plan requires legislative help

* Mayors say cut to income tax money would devastate local budgets

* Local villages feel impact of state budget crisis

* Put new spending plans on sideline