Illinois in danger of entering financial 'death spiral'

Far West

Pursuit Driver
So, it sounds like it is mostly a pension problem...

The state currently faces $130 billion in unfunded pension obligations and a backlog of unpaid bills worth $15 billion. A downgrade to “junk” status would increase the cost of borrowing for critical infrastructure, or refinancing existing debt.

“Gov. Rauner inherited this financial mess when he took office, and his proposals have been met by resentment from the speaker,” Deputy House Republican Leader Dan Brady said.

Rauner claims that the Republican plan for a budget could fix the state’s financial situation and called it a “true compromise.”

The plan incorporates reforms like property tax relief, term limits and spending caps, which have caused an “ongoing confrontation” between him and Illinois’ Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan, one Republican leader told Fox News, adding that the two have been in a “stalemate” since Rauner took office two years ago.

Brady added, “we are asking that the speaker allow for a date and a vote before June 30.”

When asked whether the legislature would be able to pass a budget package by the June 30 deadline, and about the likelihood of the change in rating, Madigan’s spokesman Steve Brown did not speculate.

“I don’t do predictions—there are numerous discussions around the State House on an effort to bring a balanced budget and see where there might be support for that,” Brown told Fox News. “I’m not in finance.”


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/26/illinois-in-danger-entering-financial-death-spiral.html
 
I like this columnist's solution: Break up Illinois and give the parts to the nearby states that work.

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Since our neighboring states are doing better, taking Illinois jobs and businesses and Illinois workers and taxpaying families, they might as well just take the rest of Illinois, too, dammit.

Wisconsin can have Chicago and begin calling it "South Milwaukee."

Naturally, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will fight this. He needs a job. And he'll most likely beg his friends at The New York Times and the Washington Post to write angry editorials to save him. And these will be full of concern for the republic and those dispossessed Midwestern salt-of-the-earth taxpaying Americans, as if.

Sadly, Wisconsin probably won't want Rahm, either. So to spare hurt feelings, I propose carving out 40 acres around the mayor's home so Rahm might be prince of his own country:

Rahmonia.

And Cook County Board President Toni "Taxwinkle" Preckwinkle will fight it, too, so she needs something to soothe her ambitions:

A grant of land as large as a case of the soda pop she taxes, so that she might stand on it and proclaim herself Queen of Taxwinkletopia.

If there are portions of Illinois that the other states don't want, they may be left as federal territory, a wilderness where only the strong survive and peasants and friendly propagandists kneel and beg for crumbs. You already know the name of this wasteland:

Madiganistan.

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Wow... I love it.

No one would miss the cesspool of Chicago... let Rahm and Toni live there...sort of their own hell.
 
I have friends near Marion and Eva, Illinois. I stayed with them a couple of years ago while we were at the State Fair horse show. Southern Illinois is much like rural Georgia, Tennessee or Kentucky. The people in that part of the state are mostly conservatives who despise the northern part of the state especially Chicago. The liberals in the large urban areas are the ones bankrupting the whole state. Not to mention one of the highest crime rates in the country in those urban crap holes.
 
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