An Illinois senator is echoing what most conservatives around the country are saying now about the possibility that Congress might spending hundreds of billions bailing out states that have mismanaged their budgets for years: Don’t.
In an op-ed for Fox News, Republican state Sen. Jason Plummer, a small business owner and former intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, noted that most Americans are not in favor of state bail outs even though they may favor providing coronavirus relief for Americans who’ve lost jobs and businesses due to coronavirus-related shutdown orders.
Plus, he says, Illinois — which has been generally run by Democrats for decades — is the poster child for state and local mismanagement and as such, should not be rewarded for bad policy decisions.
And, of course, there is that history of corruption to contend with.
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He writes:
Americans broadly support federal relief for businesses and workers, but they don’t want to bail out failed business models and corporate corruption. So how would they feel about bailing out the governance failures of America’s most corrupt state?
Welcome to Illinois, America’s shrinking state, home to 1,000 public corruption convictions in the last 20 years. Our acquisitive state politicians want over $40 billion from other states in a brazen attempt to spread the Illinois model beyond our borders.
Plummer says that his Democratic colleagues in the state Senate recently gained national attention after writing a letter to their U.S. Senate members — Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both Democrats — pleading for bailout money.
And he said that separately, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, has also sought billions in federal (read taxpayer) funds.
“Don’t let it happen. Federal dollars should not prop up Illinois’ failed system,” Plummer wrote.
“Sober-minded Illinoisans have long warned that the next economic wind would topple our financial house of cards,” he continued. “However, our leaders had other priorities. Pritzker took to the lectern for his 2020 State of the State address declaring Illinois strong and dismissing fiscal realists as ‘carnival barkers’ and ‘doomsayers,’ receiving thunderous approval from his allies. Now the entire nation knows we’re broke and these same politicians are pleading for a bailout.”
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In fact, Illinois has been bleeding revenue — and residents — for years. The state is so far behind in its pension obligations that the state’s credit rating is near junk bond status.
Worse, Pritzker has just extended the state’s stay-at-home order first issued in March because there are still coronavirus cases in Illinois — a move that will extend the state’s financial losses by choking off income taxes and other revenues associated with a fully functional economy.
It’s all adding up to fiscal disaster, and one that Americans, collectively, should not have to pay off, Plummer notes:
For decades, Illinois has chosen the fiscally irresponsible path – increased benefits, skipped pension payments, borrowing, taxing, spending and pretending. Moody’s pegs our state pension shortfall at $241 billion. Wirepoints.com adds in local liabilities for total debt of $430 billion, an insurmountable amount.
Illinois’ present problems are not merely inherited, nor a failure to tax and spend enough. Our last two budgets set state spending records while taxation brought in record receipts. Yet Illinois failed to aggressively pay down debt or plan for a rainy day. Now, in the depths of this crisis, Pritzker is promoting another income tax increase on hard-pressed Illinoisans. Just as this tax increase wouldn’t be enough, a massive federal bailout won’t satiate the reckless spending habits of Illinois’ political class.
We were once the blessed economic engine of the Midwest. But our debts have turned us into a zombie-state lagging in every meaningful financial metric, economic statistic and population trend.
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At the same time, people are moving out of the broke state in droves. The Chicago Tribune reported in December that the Illinois has lost population for six straight years, another drain on the state’s tax coffers. Less residents, fewer workers mean a drop in revenue in the long run.
The only reason receipts are up for now is because of the Pritzker-Democrat tax increases. But continuing to increase taxes has a long-term negative effect on growth and will eventually lead to a drop in revenue as more people leave.
“Our leaders simply want to feed at the federal trough without fixing this self-inflicted disaster. But Illinoisans need and seek rejuvenation,” Plummer writes. “We will thrive once again, but not until our government changes. Give our politicians the tough medicine they loathe to take and give our families the reforms they desperately need. Don’t bail out Illinois’ bankrupt system.”
