Illinois' Liberal Progressive Economic Collapse

Illinois’ Liberal Progressive Economic Collapse
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Thursday, July 8, 2010

“Few budget analysts are surprised to see ILLINOIS, with a limping economy and broken political culture, edge close to the abyss. Two of the last six governors have served jail terms, and a third is on trial.

“We are a fiscal poster child for what not to do,” Said Ralph Martire of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a liberal-leaning policy group in Illinois. “We make California look as if it’s run by penurious accountants who sit in rooms trying to put together an honest budget all day.”

“Five years ago, the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park issued about 650 home building permits; last year it processed one. The city of Rockford plans to close fire stations and lay off firefighters, and in Decatur, 180 impoverished seniors have lost their delivered meals. The lakeshore condo towers in Chicago bespeak affluence, but there are so many foreclosures on the bungalow blocks of southern and western Chicago that “for sale” signs sprout like sunflowers.

“Illinois legislators tend to plead victim to economic circumstance and the state’s maladies are considerable. In 2006, the Illinois unemployment rate stood below 5 percent; now it is near 11 percent, and the percentage of long-term unemployed exceeds the national average. Major manufacturers have eliminated thousands of jobs, and the state ranks in the top 10 nationally in foreclosure.

“Public colleges and universities occupy a fiscal sickbed all their own. This year they muddled through without $668 million expected from the state; the University of Illinois has yet to receive 45 percent of its state appropriation. Legislators made no pretense of promising to pay this bill soon. Instead they authorized colleges to borrow against the expected state payments.

“Illinois fiscal practices are thoroughly fractured. Large agencies survive from one payday to the next. Small agencies seek high-interest loans from out-of-state finance companies.

“The state pension system is a money sinkhole and the most immediate threat. The governor and legislature have shortchanged the pensions since the mid-1990s, taking payment “holidays” with alarming regularity.

“The state’s last elected governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, is on trial for racketeering and extortion. But in 2003, he persuaded the legislature to let him float $10 billion in 30-year bonds and use the proceeds for two years of pension payments.

“That gamble backfired and wound up backfired and wound up costing the state many billions of dollars. Illinois reports that it has $62.4 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, although many experts that liability tens of billions of dollars higher… For years, the Democratic-controlled legislature has passed budgets that are, in effect, in deficit. Lawmakers routinely skip around the state’s balanced-budget law, with few consequences…

“Blagojevich was not a tax-and-spend governor; he was a spend-and-borrow governor.”… {Above are excerpts from an article by Michael Powell in NY Times.}

George H. Kubeck, from: www.nytimes.com/2010/0703/business/economy/03illinois.html?_r=2&ei+5065&par