The Tally on Illinois's Fiscal Year 2012 Budget: Political Choices, Who Got Hurt
Illinois’s fiscal year 2012 (FY12) budget saga ended last week, at least for the time being. Governor Quinn approved a final budget, exercising his amendatory veto to make some further spending reductions. The General Assembly will meet later in the year to take action to approve or reject the amendments.
The general trend of this budget is both better and worse than it could have been. Illinois needed to take major steps in a balanced approach to solving the state’s immense fiscal crisis. It needed to generate significant new revenue while also getting control of the spending side. In January, the General Assembly passed and the Governor signed legislation that made major progress on the revenue side. Without that step, the carnage in the budget would have been unthinkable, and Illinois would probably be in default on many fronts. On the spending side, however, while austerity was needed and expected, the final budget includes far deeper cuts in programs that serve Illinois’s most vulnerable populations, and some of its most important priorities, than were needed.
The final state budget includes about $2 billion less in spending than Governor Quinn had proposed at the start of the FY12 budget process in February. Some of the most damaging cuts for low-income people and other vulnerable populations are:
- General State Aid to schools. The final budget is $400 million less than the Governor’s proposed budget. In addition, $400 million in federal funding that had been provided pursuant to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has ended. The greatest impact will be felt by school districts that rely more heavily on state aid because they are low-income and have lower local property tax revenues.
- Community mental health services – cut by $55 million, or 20%.
- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) – 1/3 less funding allocated to TANF in FY12 than the amount needed to serve the current caseload, which has grown due to the recession, persistent high rates of long-term unemployment, and improvements in program access.
- Elimination of the Transitional Assistance program that provided a small amount of income support to 9,000 not employable adults in Chicago.
- Cuts of up to 50% in programs for very high-risk children, including teen after school and children’s mental health programs.
- Early Childhood Block Grant – cut $17 million, a 5% reduction on top of last year’s 10% reduction. Will result in 4,000 fewer three- and four-year-olds being enrolled in preschool for all and 1,000 fewer high-risk children aged 0-3 receiving developmental screenings and other services.
These severe cuts have been justified as necessary to “live within our means,” but the truth is that these cuts were not dictated by economics but rather were the product of political considerations.
The adoption of a temporary increase in the state income tax from 3% to 5% during the January “lame duck” session, just before the newly-elected legislators took office, triggered the series of events that led to these cuts. Speaker Madigan’s immediate concern in the wake of the Democrats’ decision to approve a tax increase was the size and strength of the backlash his members would face for that vote. He used the FY12 budget process to attempt to insulate them from this backlash.
The first thing the Speaker did was to make the budget process in the House bipartisan, a departure from past practice. Speaker Madigan and Minority Leader Cross collaborated closely throughout the budget process, and rank-and-file Republican members were included in budget deliberations.
The next step was to adopt a lowball revenue estimate that would necessitate bigger than needed cuts. The House ignored the revenue estimate of the General Assembly’s own bipartisan revenue-estimating agency and instead worked off an estimate prepared by the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget, making some downward adjustments. As a result of the lowball estimate it used, the House had $1 billion less to appropriate than the Senate. When, later in the session, the Governor’s office, based on more recent economic information about the performance of the Illinois economy, revised its estimate upward to the Senate level, the House did not come along.
Next the House locked itself into the lowball revenue estimate by passing a resolution that required any revenues collected in excess of the lowball estimate be solely devoted to paying off old bills, preventing such additional revenue from being used to ameliorate the effects of harsh budget cuts.
The House and Senate passed separate budgets based on different revenue estimates. There was no real effort to reconcile the two budgets, as House members adhered to their resolution and refused to apply any additional revenues to reduce the cuts. No compromise was offered as the May 31 deadline for adopting a state budget without needing a super-majority loomed. Rather than bring the Senate Republicans, who had earlier proposed a budget with several billion more in cuts, into the budget process, the Senate Democrats capitulated to the Speaker and passed the House budget.
Senate President Cullerton made a last-ditch attempt to restore about half of the House’s cuts by attaching an amendment to the bill authorizing the expenditure of funds on capital projects, e.g., roads. When Gov. Quinn announced that summer construction projects would be halted in mid-June if the capital bill was not passed by both Houses, it appeared that he and President Cullerton might have teamed up to exert leverage on the Speaker. But in the end, Gov. Quinn called on the Senate to give in and drop the amendment so that construction could continue as scheduled.
How could deeper-than-necessary cuts have been avoided? The Responsible Budget Coalition and others championed a number of reasonable proposals to obtain the revenue needed to avoid devastating cuts without raising taxes. The most obvious one of these was to revise the revenue estimate upwards. Another recommendation was that Illinois “decouple” from a change in federal tax law that accelerated the depreciation schedule for big corporations that make large equipment purchases. Under Illinois’s tax code, absent action by the General Assembly, Illinois tax law would automatically provide this tax break as well. In the past, Illinois has de-coupled from similar changes in federal tax law to avoid major revenue losses. But this time around decoupling was falsely labeled and rejected as a “tax increase,” even though no one’s taxes would have gone up (they just wouldn’t have gotten a windfall reduction in state taxes). Decoupling would have saved the state $600 million in lost revenue and allowed the state to avoid making all of the painful cuts described above.
So what are the prospects for the future? We said above that the general trend was at least partially positive because the revenue increase balanced the state’s approach to the fiscal crisis. Now Illinois needs to return to policy considerations (instead of just political ones) before making any further cuts to vital programs and priorities. It needs to find better ways to deploy state revenues, so that more is dedicated to high priorities in the general revenue fund as opposed to lower priorities in special funds that are off budget. It needs to find a way to address the state’s $4 billion of unpaid bills.
What this budget also shows is that there was very little fat to cut. Much of what was cut was not fat at all, shortchanging wise investments like early childhood education and tragically abandoning vulnerable people. The income tax increase enacted in January is only temporary, with a large part of it phasing out after four years. The Illinois revenue problem was structural -- we did not have enough revenue to pay for the important priorities that Illinois residents rightly expect from their government. That problem was well known before the recession hit. This year’s budget includes the new revenue, makes the pension payment for the first time in years, was overly austere on the spending side – and STILL did not pay the bills. Illinois needs to reconcile itself to the fact that the revenue increase must be permanent.
