This is our best moment to draw a line between reformers and anti-reformers – Wirepoints’ Lincoln Day speech to the Grant Township Republican Club

The following is adapted from Ted Dabrowski’s keynote speech delivered at the Grant Township Republican Club’s Lincoln Day Dinner on February 12, 2022.

“I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.” – Abraham Lincoln

I think that’s a very appropriate quote for tonight, both for where Illinois is now and where it should be. 

I would argue, if we’re being honest, that Illinois isn’t making many of us proud. We may love Illinois. We may love its history. We may love our connection to it. But it’s really hard to be proud of where we live.

However, the case I want to make tonight is that there is a huge opportunity to finally change the direction of Illinois – and interestingly enough it’s coming from our government’s reaction to the pandemic. We’ve suffered a lot under COVID. Lots of lives have been lost. But the pandemic also revealed just how flawed Illinois’ status quo really is. We’ve seen individual rights destroyed. We’ve seen choice wiped out. And we’ve seen separation of powers eliminated. 

First, a quick point about Wirepoints. We’re a not-for-profit, nonpartisan group. So tonight you won’t hear me speak about Republicans and Democrats, you’re going to hear me speak about reformers and anti-reformers. 

Where is Illinois today?

On paper, Illinois is an amazing place. It’s the sixth largest state. It’s got the amazing freshwater of Lake Michigan. It’s got beautiful soil and the agriculture it produces. It’s got some of the best universities in the country, maybe in the world. It’s a transportation hub at the center of the country.

This place used to be a magnet for people from all over the world to experience freedom and democracy and live the American dream. My parents were two of them.

It’s hard to compare the Illinois of back then to today’s.

We’re now a national outlier on virtually every economic, fiscal, and demographic metric that counts. I’m not here to be negative about Illinois, but I want to point these things out because a lot of people don’t understand just how deep the crisis in Illinois is. Let’s go through a few facts. 

Gas taxes, 2nd-highest in the country. Property taxes, also 2nd-highest in the country. You can go to Indiana and pay less than half the property taxes there. 

Growth in home values, 5th-worst in the country with values that don’t keep up with inflation. Pension debts, biggest in the country. Corruption, do I need to say anything? 

Credit ratings. Right before the massive near-$200 billion dollars in federal stimulus came into Illinois, we were at the brink of becoming a junk-rated state. We would have been the first state to ever be rated junk. We avoided that, but only because of the bailout.

Chief Executive Magazine says we’re one of the worst states to do business in. And Kiplinger says Illinois is the least tax-friendly state for middle-class families. There are so many things where we are ranked 50th or 49th in the nation, and that, I think, is our challenge. 

So, a lot of people are discouraged. A lot of people can’t be proud. And so they flee.

At Wirepoints, we like to look at the IRS migration data. The IRS knows exactly where you live. They know how much money you make and they know how big your family is. They know where and when you move from one place to another. So, it’s really easy to see which states are winning people and their wealth and which states are losing. 

Since the turn of the century, Illinois has lost 1.3 million people net to out-migration. That’s the equivalent to wiping 11 of Illinois’ largest cities outside of Chicago off the map.

Imagine if 1.3 million people still lived in Illinois – if we had just broken even. The tax base would be better. Entrepreneurship would be more robust. Companies would come here to invest because there’s more population here. That’s what we’re missing out on.

Now, what does it mean in the end when I talk about people leaving? Illinois is one of three states to shrink over the last decade along with West Virginia and Mississippi. That’s the company we’re in.

On the opposite end, Texas added four million people to its population. Florida, two and a half million. They’re winning the competition for people.

Illinois is losing – for a variety of reasons. I know that everybody likes to blame the state’s high taxes, and it’s true, taxes do matter.

A good friend of mine I’ll call Bill – he wanted to be off the record – is a guy that did financial consulting and did pretty well for himself. He had a nice two-million-dollar home in the North Shore. One day, he told me “You know what? I’m paying almost $30,000 in taxes where I am. But if I look at Colorado, for a house of similar size, six acres on a mountain, I’ll be paying about $3,000.” Bill did the math in Excel. He could save $27,000 a year, invest and grow it at 6 percent, and that turned into a million dollars over 20 years.

Bill told me, “If I trusted the government here, I might stick around, but I’m not going to give them the equivalent of a million dollars because I know taxes will only go up and I won’t be better off.” So Bill moved. He’s in Colorado. He’s got a wonderful place he’s invested in and he’s saving lots of money.

That’s the kind of calculation some people do. Others do kitchen table math. They’re looking right over the border to Indiana or Missouri or Wisconsin and say: “Illinois doesn’t work for me.” 

They’re looking at the lower cost-of-living in Indiana or they’re looking at the job opportunities in Wisconsin and they’re making their move.

Two years ago I met another ex-Illinoisan while visiting family in Atlanta. I went in for a haircut and got into a conversation with the stylist – a middle-aged black lady. She asked where I was from and I told her the Chicago area.

She told me she left Illinois a while back. She had owned a salon in Collinsville and was doing okay there, but said there was no vibrancy there. No energy. No future. 

So she left. She found Atlanta had far more vibrancy and entrepreneurship. The numbers back her up. If you look at the statistics for the easiest cities to start a business, Atlanta ranked 9th in the country in 2019. Chicago ranked 85th out of 100. 

What happened to reform?

So, it’s tough to be proud of Illinois, which covers the first half of Lincoln’s quote. But the second half, I think, is more important. “I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.”

Are we living in a manner that Illinois could be proud of? Are we, the collective we, doing what we need to do to make his state the great place it should be?

Lincoln would hate where we are today. He’d hate the status quo. He’d hate the lack of freedom during COVID, the lack of individual choice, and the destruction of separation of powers. 

But he’d also ask, what about the reformers? Would he be proud of the reform movement – a group that I’ve been a part of for a little over a decade? Are we doing what we need to do? 

I think we can do better. I think many of us have gotten tired because of the courts, or the media, or the unfair balance of political money. It’s so discouraging that sometimes we sacrifice principles in order to get a seat at the table, hoping that we can make bad deals just a bit better.

But I argue that, this time around, it’s time for us to be super-principled and super-strong. Otherwise, we’ll continue to be a minority. 

Now, I’ve mentioned a lot of bad things about Illinois. It’s a depressing reality that leads some people to say, “Ted, why don’t you just give up?” Or they say, “Hey, look, Illinois can’t be fixed, just leave.” Or, when they hear I want to reform pensions and collective bargaining laws and bring school choice, they say, “Forget it man. This is Illinois. You’ll never get that!” 

Why fight at all? Well, I argue there will come a time when the math in Illinois won’t work. That will be the point when reforms will finally be possible.

We were almost at that point two years ago, before COVID. Illinois was running out of money and there were rumors of us becoming a junk-rated state. Then the pandemic hit and the federal bailouts helped plug the state’s holes. But when those dollars run out, Illinois will be right back to where we were before: a fiscal cliff.

So, the real question is, will the reformers be ready when we hit that cliff again? Can we turn Illinois around when the opportunity presents itself? I believe we can.

Learning from Poland

Where do I get my inspiration for saying that? How can I say that when I look at Illinois and see such a sad state of affairs? 

Because I also had a chance to live in Poland for nine years. 

I moved to Poland in 1998. The Berlin Wall had been down only about seven years, and man, did I learn a lot about turnarounds there. Poland was a country that was still rebuilding in many ways. Individual and economic rights had been wiped out under communism for nearly 50 years. The people waited a long time to be free.

They never gave up, by the way. If you know Pols, you know they never give up.

About a decade before the wall came down, Lech Walesa and a whole bunch of workers said “this isn’t going to last – if we prepare, we can take over our country again.” And so for ten years Solidarity planned and charted a path forward. They were ready when the wall came down. They were ready to take action: rebuilding, restoring, transforming and liberalizing.

A place that was once rubble is now one of the fastest growing countries in the world. Since the wall fell, the Polish economy has done amazingly well. They didn’t experience a Great Recession like the rest of the world did in 2008. That’s the kind of place Poland is.

I was lucky enough to be there to watch both the left and the right work together to privatize companies, restore individual rights, enact legal reforms and let companies and entrepreneurship grow.

I argue that Illinois is not that different. Of course, we haven’t gone through what Poland has gone through, so in theory Illinois should be a lot easier to fix.

Just like in Poland, at some point the math here simply won’t work. We must be ready with the reforms and with the good ideas to turn this state around when that happens.

Our opportunity

So, what’s the opportunity the reform movement has today? Well, I think this is an awesome time to differentiate ourselves, the best time ever to draw a line between the reformers and the anti-reformers. Let me lay it out.

The anti-reform, status quo guys say criminals are victims. We say criminals are criminals. 

They say defund the police. We say support the police. 

They say teachers unions first. We say students first. 

They say remote learning. We say school choice. 

They say bailouts. We say open the economy. 

They say more handouts. We say more jobs. 

And they say tax hikes. We say reforms.

The difference is as clear as night and day. But can we capture this moment? Can we express ourselves well enough? Can we be principled enough?

There are four principles I think we should all follow to get there – whether you’re in policy-making or lawmaking or if you’re just trying to talk to and persuade your neighbors.

Number one, we’ve got to get rid of identity politics and groupthink and get back to the individual as the center of everything we think about. The sanctity of the individual and the God-given rights each of us has must be at the core of everything we do. Because right now, it’s not. 

Take Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s budget or Governor Pritzker’s budget. They’re both full of words like “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and far more. All these are buzzwords that hardly mean anything and distract from the goal of protecting and promoting individual rights.

Number two, push decision-making down to the lowest possible level. Right now, we’re federalizing everything. That’s the goal in Washington D.C., but it’s also the same here in Illinois. Springfield’s idea is to take as much power from local government and put it in the hands of the state. Just look at what’s happened with the governor’s “emergency” powers. We’ve had 700-plus straight days of executive orders. Of rule by fiat. That is simply wrong.

Does a law give more power to a bigger government? Get rid of it. Does it push things down to the local level and give power to the individual? Accept it.

Number three, embrace individual choice. Again, something that’s being forgotten. School choice. Health choice. Job choice. Retirement choice. Give people back the power to make their own decisions.

Finally, love Trump or hate him, one of the great things he did was focus on deregulation. If we’re ever going to give the ordinary people of Illinois a chance to succeed, especially minorities, we’ve got to deregulate the heck out of this economy. Get government out of the way. People have to be able to thrive. Entrepreneurship has to be able to thrive.

My request to all of you tonight is to be prepared. Be prepared with solutions, so when the math no longer works, we can be ready. The last thing we want, and the last thing Illinois needs, is to be stuck with incremental reforms.

Illinois’ future

People ask me why we do what we do at Wirepoints. My own personal answer is because my parents came here and they were able to live the American dream. This was a great state 60 years ago. Of course, every place has its faults, but people across the world were clamoring to be an American, clamoring to be an Illinoisan and clamoring to be a Chicagoan because this was a place where you could grit it out and live your dream.

My parents gritted it out. Life wasn’t beautiful for them, trust me, but they gritted it out. 

So, with that said, let’s think about the principles we need to find good policies, good laws and good candidates. Let’s think about the opportunity COVID has given us. The status quo side, the anti-reformers, have shown their cards – and they’re really ugly cards. It’s our job as reformers to make that ugliness even more obvious.

And let’s avoid incrementalism. Let’s avoid compromising our principles just to try to get some marginal change. Let’s go for it. This is the moment to be bold.

Solidarity didn’t back down. They didn’t water down their demands. They doubled down on them. And they won.

Reformers like us have to do the same so that we can be proud of where we live – and where we live can be proud of us.

Thank you.