What do you get when your state legislators have either entered a dissociative fugue or are maliciously conspiring against the people of Illinois? You get the budget recently enacted here. As Steven Malanga notes at City Journal:
As I’ve pointed out before, the national economic recovery has been weak, and many states are struggling to balance their books in the face of diminished revenues. But no other state faces the combination of a mountain of unpaid bills, a pension system whose funding levels are already among the lowest anywhere, and judicial rulings that have narrowed the state’s options to wiggle out of the mess.
Considering that situation, bold reforms were necessary. What Illinois did, instead, was the least that it could do to avoid getting its bond rating dropped to junk status. You have to wonder how much deeper the crisis has to become to get the state’s leaders to act decisively, and whether they’ll miscalculate and run out of time before they have that chance.
Reality has a way of intervening. The last time the state income tax rate was increased it did not realize revenues proportional to the increase. It realized less and that was when Illinois had more residents and businesses than it does now, something else that’s a consequence of Illinois’s misfeasant, malfeasant, and nonfeasant legislature.
There are no legal democratic solutions to our problems. Mssrs. Madigan and Cullerton are not elected by the people of Illinois but by the voters in their districts who are, apparently, happy with them. Illinois is doomed to continue its downward spiral.
Did they in fact prevent a bond downgrade? Given the issues the agencies were supposedly evaluating nothing material has changed in a few days.