Investors Business Daily:

Gov. Bruce Rauner is fighting almost single-handedly against an entrenched, corrupt political class of lawyers, lobbyists, social service providers, media and teachers unions whose rallying cry is to smother reform and maintain business as usual in Springfield.

But business as usual has virtually bankrupted the once mighty industrial and agricultural capital of the Midwest. Illinois is now more than three weeks into the 2016 fiscal year with no budget in sight.

A spending plan passed by the Democrat-dominated legislature was almost $5 billion in the red (out of total expenditures of $34 billion) and bereft of ideas about where the money was going to come from to pay for it. Rauner squashed every word of this abomination with his veto pen — and rightly so.

Years of overspending have many state and city of Chicago bonds selling at junk status. Illinois is now called “the deadbeat state” because it’s two to three months behind in paying billions of dollars of bills owed. Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels quips, “Being a neighboring state to Illinois is like living next door to the Simpsons.”

Money matters have grown so perilous in Springfield, the budget office tells us, that 25% of all tax revenue is now used to fund public employee pension obligations. Who wants to move to a place where a quarter of your taxes are used not for basic municipal services but to subsidize pension agreements made years ago for retired public employees who now live in Arizona or Florida?

For decades, Illinois has been ruled by two indomitable political forces that have brought it to this sad place: House speaker for life Michael Madigan and the teachers union bosses.

Meanwhile, Gary Cooper — er, Gov. Rauner — won’t sign a budget until he gets concessions on how the state operates. He wants pension reform (obviously), Medicaid savings, cuts in workers’ compensation, a sensible redistricting plan and an overhaul of so-called “project labor agreements” — a giveaway to the unions that inflates the cost of construction projects.

Rauner should take a lesson from Illinois’ neighbor to the north. Six years ago, Wisconsin’s plight was just as dire, with unemployment running above 9% and red ink topping $1 billion. Republican Gov. Scott Walker stared down the public employee unions and trimmed excessive compensation costs while ending the crisis of runaway pensions and ending automatic tenure for teachers.

Walker later made Wisconsin a right-to-work state. It has subsequently seen a steep drop in unemployment while taxes have been cut and the budget balanced.

Madigan and the unions want to wait out Rauner in hopes that he’ll eventually buckle under. But this is a gunfight that the governor and taxpayers can’t lose.

Remember the Fleeing Fourteen Democratic state senators who bugged out to Illinois to avoid the Act 10 vote? They went the right direction, because their bad economics tanked state finances in the late 2000s, just as Illinois’ is doing to itself now.