Former President Obama remains grimly silent as the state that sent him to the Senate and gave him a national career crashes and burns, taking the hopes of its poor with it. From the Illinois Policy Institute:
Illinois’ rapidly growing budget deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30 is estimated to arrive at $6.2 billion, according to a fiscal review conducted by the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, or COGFA. And COGFA predicted that if Illinois were to enter its third fiscal year with no budget, the deficit would grow to $7.7 billion and the state’s unpaid bills would rise to $22.7 billion by June 2018.
Decades of blue model governance have left Illinois with powerful public sector unions, a legislature subservient to them, and an intractable public pension problem. Politico recently labeled Illinois America’s first “failed state,” as feuding between the Democratic legislature and the Republican governor over how to handle the state’s cascading fiscal crisis brings governance to a standstill.
President Obama’s leadership in the crisis would be helpful—but then again, it might force him to confront some inconvenient truths about the failures of doctrinaire Democratic policymaking.
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