In Illinois, we citizens don’t ask a lot from our legislators. If they show up for parades and don’t go quite so far as to actually rent out the Statehouse for casino gaming, we’re usually satisfied. But one thing we do expect is that, especially in a tough economic climate, they put aside their perennial goal of getting re-elected long enough to write a balanced budget.
By no stretch does the budget that legislators approved Sunday meet that simple constitutional demand. Instead our wise solons chickened out of making the difficult cuts needed to put state spending in line with real, honest-to-Abe revenues. The budget passed Sunday instead is a tricked-up set of numbers, a cynical, cowardly abdication of responsibility in an election year.
It’s now up to Gov. George Ryan to do the job that 177 legislators couldn’t. Ryan has shown for eight months that he takes balancing the budget far more seriously than do many legislators. He’s cut current spending on popular programs when there was no money to pay for them, and he’s also proposed increasingly strict budgets for the 2003 fiscal year that begins in just 26 days.
Everything about Ryan’s performance on this issue suggests he won’t sign this budget without vetoing hundreds of millions of dollars in spending that legislators larded into it, or didn’t want to pay for. Ryan would be smart to veto his way back toward the sensible balance of spending and revenues he proposed on Memorial Day. That would undo much of the damage done since then by members of the General Assembly.
Here’s how that damage shakes out: On Memorial Day, Ryan suggested a balanced general fund budget of $22.5 billion for fiscal 2003. Legislators then failed to enact about $220 million of the targeted taxes he proposed, added $276 million in new spending, and ignored an unexpected shortfall of $200 million in May revenues. That means the legislators created, or refused to deal with, problems totaling some $700 million.
The so-called solution they tossed into the budget is a shortsighted scheme to borrow money–at a relatively high interest rate, no less–against future payments from a national tobacco settlement. Not that they actually had the guts to borrow the money. Instead they gave Ryan the authority to do the borrowing by selling general obligation bonds. Their essential message to Ryan: We don’t have the spines to cut spending, so if you want a balanced budget, go borrow.
Never mind that Illinois would pay interest of about 5 percent on the bonds–more than twice the cost to the state of ordinary short-term borrowing. Never mind that Illinois would be eating its seed corn, raiding money it may need far more desperately in the future. Never mind that Illinois would be hitching its wagon to shaky future revenues and inviting scrutiny of its bond rating. This tobacco scheme isn’t about legislators governing. It’s about toadying up to voters and public employees’ unions by not making the spending cuts that George Ryan now must make.
Ryan has pledged to the people of Illinois that he will not sign a budget that relies on smoke and mirrors. This one relies on the possibility of smoke and mirrors–and on the chance that Ryan will be so foolish as to make public debt from borrowed tobacco money his fiscal legacy.
It could have been worse. The legislature didn’t pass an income or sales tax increase, and rejected a cheesy ploy to auction off a gaming license and bail out the Emerald Casino crowd.
But legislators did fail spectacularly at their basic task: making next year’s state expenditures match real revenues that continue to drop. Come November, that failure is something voters should remember with a vengeance.
As for this budget: Governor, get out the knife.
