“Illinois has experienced long-running and intensifying operating fund liquidity pressure, given faster growth in expenditures than in revenues.”
—Moody’s Investors Service, Dec. 29.
The state of Illinois’ debts and unfunded liabilities now total a future-killing $160 billion. A habit of “faster growth in expenditures than in revenues” will do that.
This week, many of the lawmakers who engineered Illinois’ spectacular record of failure are returning to Springfield for a final few days of last year’s legislative session — and they’re in a rush to grab gobs of new revenue. Plans are afoot to raise the 3 percent state income tax to either 4 percent or 5 percent. To vastly expand legal gambling at casinos and racetracks. To borrow $3.7 billion for state employees’ pensions. Or to blow well beyond that unjustifiable new debt and instead borrow a total of $15 billion to feed the pension beast and also pay down a backlog of bills.
Only one force of nature stopped several of these notions from becoming law in 2010: the solidarity of Republican legislators who refused to suck still more billions into Springfield until majority Democrats make radical reforms to how Illinois manages the money it already collects. We hope that solidarity doesn’t vanish just because Democratic leaders are frantic to jam as much action as they can into these few days.
The 2010 General Assembly is about to turn into a pumpkin. The new General Assembly, with more Republicans (and some freshman Democrats who campaigned as responsible money managers), takes over Jan. 12.
The overriding danger here is that Gov. Pat Quinn, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton will create some hydra-headed monster before that date— a deal that combines several financial proposals — and foist it with little or no warning on the people of Illinois. Think back to the Springfield Surprise by which legalization of video gambling sped through the 2009 legislature and you have a sense of how much chicanery can erupt instantaneously in the state capital.
That’s primarily because so many lawmakers are short-term thinkers — unable to anticipate dreadful consequences tomorrow of what they do today. Which is how that roughly $160 billion in debts and unfunded liabilities grew so mammoth: one quickie decision after another, with no long-range reform of how Illinois does business.
Many of these folks don’t want to change how Illinois does business. Ask yourself what has changed in Springfield since these words appeared on this page one year ago Monday:
Your state is in dreadful shape financially — well on its way to being New Michigan or, worse, New California. … The list of money-saving moves private companies long ago would have made goes on and on. One result of the pols’ chronic refusal to respect the public’s money as if it was their own: Officials of this state, and too many county governments, deliver greater loyalty and more secure futures to their public employees than they deliver to the citizens who pay their salaries. That’s unjust. Illinois pols cannot ask for more in taxes until they reform how they spend the tens of billions they already collect each year…. Another loopy preconception that needs to be jettisoned: That Illinois can sustain itself by continuing to borrow.
Well, since you read that passage, your Illinois lawmakers have:
* Managed to drive the state’s credit rating to the worst — yes, below Michigan’s and California’s — in the nation. And Moody’s certainly appears as if it’s plotting yet another costly downgrade of Illinois bonds.
* Appeased the public employees unions by refusing to modify future pension benefits earned by current workers.
* Continued to borrow and borrow and borrow, burying our children and grandchildren even deeper in our debts.
We hope the current legislators — and especially those who’ll leave office next week — will stand strong against proposals that would further doom Illinois’ future. We hope they’ll continue to demand significant spending reforms before new revenue washes on Springfield.
We also hope legislative leaders don’t hand the rest of us another serving of Springfield Surprise. Whatever deals you cut, lawmakers, make sure you give the people of Illinois three or more days to react before you conduct your final votes.
Because, come Jan. 12, the 2010 legislature will be history and some of its members will be gone. But the rest of us who live in Illinois will have to contend for a long time with whatever good — or irresponsible — governance happens in the next few days.
