The editors of the Chicago Tribune, reacting to remarks from Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, muse over the governor’s comparison of Illinois to a “banana republic”:
During the long budget battle in Springfield, many inventive and harsh things have been said by those on each side. But in decrying the financial condition of the state government, Gov. Bruce Rauner took the rhetorical fight to a new level. “The Democrats have spent our state into the toilet for 30 years,” he asserted. “We are like a banana republic.”
No, not a Banana Republic store, part of the clothing chain. The governor was alluding to certain Latin American nations with a longstanding reputation for irresponsible governance.
They do bring up one good point: the Chicago Public Schools’s credit rating is B2, the same as Honduras’s. So we have that going for us.
What we have in common with Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Panama are official mismanagement, corruption, and lack of democracy. Illinois is, unfortunately, exceedingly stable.
I think the comparison is patently unfair to the countries of Central America. Historically, they’re one crop countries which have been drastically undercapitalized and ruled for lengthy periods by military dictatorships. Illinois’s problems are completely of our own making.
Nice tongue-in-cheek commentary, Dave.
Y’know, Illinois was a textbook case of a badly run state, with a single huge Democratic city surrounded by a largely rural and Republican-voting countryside, as far back as the Nixon-Kennedy race in 1961. Maybe even earlier.
It isn’t as if Illinois is troubled by new, suddenly appearing fiscal and political crises, in other words. This crap has been happening day after day for over fifty years, and people keep talking about wonderful Reform would be but it never happens. I have to think at this point, this kind of dysfunctional behavior is what the bright, affluent, well-educated, politically sophisticated voters of Illinois actually WANT to happen, even if they say otherwise.
Fifty plus f***ing years, guy. That’s not chance, it’s policy.
And Michael Madigan has been Speaker of the Illinois House for almost forty of those years.