After the cowardly failure of the Illinois legislature to address the problem the state faces in paying its public pensions in its regular legislative session, Illinois, already the state with the lowest credit rating, has had its credit rating lowered again:
One of the three major ratings agencies has downgraded the value of Illinois state government credit.
Fitch Ratings said Monday it would drop the Illinois rating from “A†to “A-†based on lawmakers’ failure to enact a solution to the state’s public-employee pension crisis.
Illinois already has the lowest rating in the nation. Lower ratings mean paying higher interest rates on borrowed money.
A lower credit rating means higher operating expenses for the state—the state relies very heavily on short term borrowing. For a good backgrounder on Illinois’s finances see here. That means that not only have Illinois’s legislators failed to face the state’s most serious fiscal problem they’ve actually compounded it.
When will the voters of Illinois realize that sending the same people who dreated the problems in the first place back to Springfield year after year, term after term, where they can refuse to cope with the problems again and again? Never, is my guess.
When will the voters of Illinois realize that sending the same people who dreated the problems in the first place back to Springfield year after year, term after term, where they can refuse to cope with the problems again and again? Never, is my guess.
Voters in Illinois, like those in CA , have entrenched social progressive politics governing them. One would think people could see the damage being done, and then turn the page at the next election. But, party ID seems to trump reason and logic every time. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the most pragmatic, fair or long term plans addressing given problems, but rather what letter of the alphabet is next to a candidate’s name, and of course, who the unions support.
Here in CA we have a bump in revenue this year, which has everyone cheering. However, most think the extra money may be more of a one-time event, even with the surcharges now in place on the ‘rich,’ mainly due to be selling off assets to avoid the increase in capital gain taxes in 2013. Now the super majority democratic legislature is teething to put the extra money back into social programs, rather than applying it to the huge deficits this state still has. Even Jerry Brown is attempting to temper the enthusism of these dull-witted politicians from throwing whatever gains have been made, all away.
Keep on voting, I’m sure someday you’ll find that pony!
One reason voters in Illinois might have difficulty in choosing better people to represent them in their state may be because of untowards political intervention in their elections, like what was played out in the Al Salvi 1996 campaign, when he unsuccessfully ran against Dick Durbin. Seventeen years ago, a familiar figure in today’s scandals, Lois Lerner, appeared to exercise similar political muscle, via another civil servant’s job, to create an harrassment-type obstacle course for a conservative candidate. The charges she brought up were later dropped, but not before her mission of distraction and financial punishment to the person targeted had been accomplished.
To add even more hubris to this event Salvi claimed that Lerner had offered him a deal, early on, to promise never to run for office again, in which case the charges would be dropped. He asked her if she would put this in writing, and she said “No.” He refused her offer. Recently, when Lerner took the 5th, in the current IRS controversy, Salvi recognized her as the perpetrator of his own grievances, years back.
History seems to be repeating itself.
A postscript to Lois Lerner’s abysmal behavior in Illinois was that she was ‘promoted,’ which seems to be the case, a lot, in dirty politics.