“Illinois is like Venezuela now” may be one of the best opening lines of an opinion column, if not the greatest, it’s certainly in the discussion.
Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass follows that up with a suggestion to break up Illinois and give pieces to its neighboring states Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and Iowa. He does not suggest how much those states would need to be paid or by whom to take on the accumulated debts of their respective pieces of the Land of Lincoln, and those debts are many.
After two years without a formal budget, Gov. Bruce Rauner has capitulated to demands for higher taxes with no structural or spending reforms in return. It’s not that Illinois had budgets in any normal sense of the word before Rauner and Speaker Michael Madigan reached their impasse. Like most states, Illinois has tens of billions of dollars in unfunded promises for retired state employee pensions and health benefits, but it also has billions in unpaid bills for current contracts with vendors and nonprofits.
Fiscal irresponsibility begins with high spending. There is no limit to the programs that could be funded to correct all the ills of an imperfect world populated with imperfect people, but there is a limit to how much can be extracted in taxes. Illinois passed that limit. North Carolina’s legislators have wisely tried to stay away from that limit and generally continue that avoidance in the current budget.
