A couple of weeks ago we learned that the state of Illinois is facing almost certain financial disintegration because of decades of Democrats’ shockingly irresponsible government spending. It’s gotten so bad that now Illinois state lawmakers are receiving eviction notices on their local offices:
The state’s money problems are so bad that lawmakers are getting eviction notices and calls from collection agencies about their offices back home.
At least five state senators say they’ve piled up so much unpaid rent, sheepish landlords are asking them when the government plans to make good on its bills.
“He said, ‘Ira, I’m sorry,'” said Sen. Ira Silverstein, D-Chicago, recalling a visit from his landlord delivering an eviction notice. “And what am I going to do? I can’t argue with the man.”
While none of the lawmakers has actually gotten the boot yet, they are getting a taste of the frustratingly slow pace at which the state pays bills as it careens toward a $13 billion budget hole. It’s a pain that’s magnified exponentially for school districts, drug rehabilitation counselors and businesses awaiting tax refunds.
“It certainly puts us in a position of looking like deadbeats,” said Sen. Mike Jacobs, an East Moline Democrat who got an eviction notice last year from a longtime friend who has rented the same building for years to the senator and his father before him. Payment eventually arrived — nine months late — but Jacobs was prepared to pay if the state had failed to come through.
A notice threatening eviction startled freshman Sen. Dan Duffy, a Lake Barrington Republican. Unsure when the state will cough up the $10,000 it owes his landlord, Duffy is scrambling to see if he can take refuge in a nearby secretary of state driver’s license outlet or a local library should he eventually get evicted.
“When they can’t pay the rent of a Senate office, there’s no way they’re going to be able to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars in bills that they have back due,” Duffy said. “It just shows what a tragic crisis we’re in and how far out of hand this is.”
Out of hand? That’s one of the biggest understatements I’ve ever heard. And it’s gotten that way because the state’s Democrats threw around taxpayer dollars so quickly and nonchalantly that it was hard to tell if they were lawmakers or spoiled, rich trust-fund teenagers. Unfortunately, the GOP were pretty seriously handicapped in both the Senate (22 GOP to 37 Dems) and the House (48 GOP to 69 Dems), which meant the Democrats could pretty much spend taxpayer money as they pleased on any pet projects and entitlement programs they liked. Now the state is on the verge of economic collapse.
But I can’t place blame solely on the Democrats. The voters can’t point the finger at state government as if they had nothing to do with their state’s current mess. They must share some of the blame for continually reelecting those bozos.
Update: Now that the Democrats have spent Illinois back to the stone age, Illinois’ Democrat governor Pat Quinn wants to raise the state income tax by a third, from 3% to 4%. Not only are the Democrats irresponsible spenders, they’re irresponsible taxers, too. Quinn seems to think he can raise taxes in a vacuum; however, a tax increase will have a negative ripple effect that will hurt Illinois’ taxpayers by confiscating more of their income at a time when they need every single penny they make to support their families. They simply don’t have the disposable income to pay more taxes.
The Democrats’ terrible management of the Illinois state budget makes me think of a sign I used to see in a few offices of people I used to work with a number of years ago:
Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
