The incalculable cost of the General Assembly's budget
The Illinois General Assembly meets this week to attempt to resolve the budget. Failure carries with it incalculable costs that prolong the recession and hit every legislative district.
The impending cuts directly impact hundreds of thousands of children, seniors, people who are sick and hurt, the unemployed, and workers. The costs to them are staggering, but there are other costs:
- The state will get sued repeatedly. Some of the cuts would violate federal or state laws. Some would violate existing court orders and consent decrees. The Attorney General’s office must defend all these cases, but it has its own shrunken budget and would be swamped.
- Proposed cuts violate the condition in the federal stimulus law that states not cut Medicaid. This will cost us billions in federal stimulus funds.
- The state would also lose massive sums of federal matching funds and block grant dollars across a range of programs.
- These lost federal funds come out of the Illinois economy – it is money not spent on goods and services in our state.
- The Department of Human Services estimates that the cuts to its budget would cause a loss of 170,000 jobs outside of state government. These are entrepreneurs, independent caregivers, and employees of non-profit or for-profit businesses that provide or support the programs in various ways.
- Legislators have spent their careers building important programs that will be gutted or eliminated by this process. Time, talent, and hard-won accomplishment would be wasted.
The General Assembly’s budget would prolong the recession and hurt the state, not just those who need the programs. We need to fund the government and not bring about all of the above incalculable costs.
