There is a responsible solution to Illinois budget crisis
Citizen Action/Illinois, the state’s largest public-interest advocacy organization, partnering with an unprecedented array of over 30 human services providers, advocacy groups and labor unions, is issuing “A Call for Responsible Leadership”—a letter urging the governor and legislative leaders to approve a state budget with sufficient revenue to fund essential public services and prevent devastating loss.
Lawmakers share responsibility to enact a budget that meets the state’s obligations to protect public safety and health, strengthen our economy, and ensure every child has the educational opportunity they deserve. Instead they left a massive budget hole and resorted to political finger-pointing about who is to blame.
We call on legislative leaders from both parties to set aside partisan politics and work together to craft a responsible budget, recognizing that:
It is morally irresponsible to hold Illinois families hostage to political games: The budget approved by the legislature cuts both grants and funding for many public services by fifty percent or more. Now Illinois families who depend on those services, such as seniors needing pharmaceutical assistance or women and children who have been victims of sexual assault, are being held hostage to politics.
Cutting the budget for needed public services is irresponsible in the current circumstances: The worst economic downturn in memory and the highest unemployment rate in decades mean that the need for state supported services is greater than ever. The need for health care, education, and family services, is increasing and state support should as well. Further, studies show that every dollar invested in prevention programs saves taxpayers an average of $6 to $8 down the road.
There is a responsible solution: The Illinois State Senate approved a revenue plan that would have funded the state’s critical human needs, address its long-term structural deficit, and provided relief from regressive taxation. That plan was endorsed by the Governor and approved by a committee of the House, yet it was never called for a vote before that chamber adjourned. Illinois legislators need to return to Springfield and enact an adequate revenue plan to fully fund need state services before the new fiscal years starts on July 1.
Lynda DeLaforgue and William McNary
Co-Directors, Citizen Action/Illinois
Chicago
The many decades of the altruism you continue to push for has brought the rot that has all but entirely destroyed Chicago, Illinois and the country. Providing ever more lavish welfare for the ever expanding “poor” has tapped us out – there’s nothing left. My advice for you, Citizen Action / Illinois, is to brace for impact. Hoping, feeling and praying that there would be no day of reckoning for outlandish looting, spending (far outside of proper functions of government), and rewarding laziness was nothing but a self-imposed delusion. Reality has the final say in these matters.
egoist
Well said. The country will be bankrupt by 2012.
“Citizen Action/Illinois, the state’s largest public-interest advocacy organization, partnering with an unprecedented array of over 30 human services providers, advocacy groups and labor unions, is issuing “A Call for Responsible Leadership”—a letter urging the governor and legislative leaders to approve a state budget with sufficient revenue to fund essential public services and prevent devastating loss.”
Just what the state of Illinois needs, more human service provider, advocacy group and labor union involvement in the State budget process. This is how we created the problem in the first place, by creating all these social service handouts and state mandated union benefits. YOU ARE OUT OF MONEY PEOPLE! Your broke! you can’t keep spending what you don’t have regardless of what these people tell you!
You will please note how Ms DeLafrgue and Mr McNary state their choice for a budget plan but they don’t state how that plan will be paid for. Will they cut spending in other areas or will they increase taxes? They state the plan will cut “regressive taxation” but fail to define what regressive taxation is. Is it regressive to tax people to pay for roads, police or fire protection? It it regressive to force your next door neighbor to pay for your medical care or benefits? If you wish for someone else to pay you for anything, go ask them yourself; but of course you won’t do that, it’s easier and safer for you to get the state to confiscate what they worked for and provide it to you in services or cash.
The receivers of this largess obviously don’t care that the money confiscated from their neighbor would have gone to pay for their neighbor’s medical care, housing, children’s education, etc..
The devil is always in the details. Do you think for one minute that Ms DeLafrgue and Mr McNary’s choice of budget solutions will cut any form of state approved benefits, or social services? Will it keep illegal aliens out of public schools, off the welfare rolls, or out of the hospital emergency rooms? What services will be cut back to pay for social services? Will it cut public health, education, or other funding which really is the government’s responsibility? (Your welfare is not the Government’s responsibility.)
Remember:
Socialism only works until you run other of other people’s money. - Margaret Thatcher
Where are all the liberal socialists calling for more social spending by the Chicago/Obama crowd?
Where is Garrison calling for more union power to raid the state treasury and provide more benefits to union members?
Where is Lisa12 calling for more state spending to provide medical care for the illegals and those who decided education was too much effort and are now doomed to unskilled labor?
Where is Tim Hogan, that great legal mind who has all the answers as to how the state can confiscate more wealth from the producers?
Come on liberals, you know the state’s broke but that has never stopped you from calling for more spending before! You’re all firm believers in Obama’s plan to spend our way into prosperity, can’t the State of Illinois do the same?
You are all oh so quite on this thread. I wonder why?