Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman seemed to be under the impression after his meeting last week with Governor Pat Quinn that the state's income-tax hike would actually expire in four years.

"The tax increase is temporary," Oberhelman told reporters, who wanted to know how he really felt about the recent tax hike. There'd been much media speculation that the Caterpillar CEO was so unhappy about the tax increase that he might move his company elsewhere. Oberhelman added that revenue growth will be necessary to fill the gap, and "it's going to take some spending cuts," which, he said, he was confident that Quinn could pull off.

After Oberhelman answered the question, Quinn told reporters that the "income tax is a four-year situation," and said he wanted to "erase the deficit" during that time.

Technically and legally, the tax hike is temporary. Two income-tax hikes have been allowed to expire in Illinois history, so it's possible that this one will as well.

But the governor used phantom revenues in his most recent budget plan and proposed an increase in state spending, not a decrease.

Secretary of State Jesse White has been saying for at least the past two years that this fourth term would be his last. By the end of this term, he'll be the longest-serving secretary of state in the history of Illinois. It seemed like a good way to go out.

"This is my last run for public office," White told the Chicago Defender just before the November election.

"I think I am going to spend time working with the Jesse White Foundation," he said. The Chicago city council recently voted to spend $10 million on a training facility for the Jesse White Tumbling Team. White's foundation is supposed to kick in $5 million.

The new facility would be part of his significant legacy. Most people wouldn't even drive near Chicago's old Cabrini Green public-housing complex. White went in there and recruited those kids, trained them to do superhuman feats, and not only kept them out of trouble, but showed them how to make a life for themselves and their community.

One of the main reasons the Democratic Party did so poorly across the nation last year and lost ground in Illinois was the defection of senior citizens to the Republican Party.

On Election Day 2006, national exit polling showed voters 65 and older split their ballots 49-49 between the two parties. In Illinois, however, senior citizens went with Democrat Rod Blagojevich over Republican Judy Baar Topinka by 10 points, 50-40.

Last year, national exit polling showed Republicans with a huge 59-38 margin over Democrats among seniors. In Illinois, the exit polls showed that Pat Quinn lost the senior-citizen vote to Republican Bill Brady by 17 points, 55-38. Quinn ended up beating Brady by less than 32,000 votes. Blagojevich won his last election by more than 10 times that amount: 367,000. The lost senior vote accounted for more than half the difference between those two margins.

So some Democrats may be forgiven for cringing last week after reading the headlines about how Senate President John Cullerton was floating the idea of taxing retirement income. Their party needs to woo that all-important and rapidly growing demographic back to the fold, not alienate it even more. Those stories probably didn't sit well at all with the oldsters. There's a reason why only five states tax all retirement income, and it ain't fiscal.

After decades of dominating every tiny aspect of life in his legislative chamber, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan now appears to want his members to grow up a little and do some things for themselves.

One of the first steps in that process to adulthood is handing more power to the House's five appropriations committees and the House Revenue Committee.

The appropriations committees have been toothless kittens for decades. They listen to a parade of agency directors outline their upcoming budget requests and press them about jobs for various constituencies, minority and otherwise. Occasionally, an appropriations chair will briefly have a seat at the bargaining table when the governor and the leaders sit down to talk turkey. But, for the most part, they've been cut out of the process. That's especially been the case the past two years, when the General Assembly has sent "lump sum" appropriations to the governor to avoid specifying cuts.