The Shriver Brief : Poverty Law Commentary & Insights : Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law : Affordable Housing, Healthcare Reform

Yesterday, Governor Quinn signed into law the bills that amount to the Illinois state budget for fiscal year 2011. These are the bills the General Assembly sent him, together with roughly half of the money needed to pay for them. The Governor made some alterations and revealed a host of decisions around the funding for agencies and programs. The budget includes cuts of over $240 million for elementary and secondary education, $100 million for higher education, and $312 million for human services. Ninety percent of Illinois general fund spending is aimed at education, health care, human services, and public safety. It follows that those are the vital things being cut, like it or not.

Governor Quinn and his Administration made it clear that they are not happy with these cuts, necessitated by the failure of the General Assembly to produce sufficient revenue to responsibly fund the government. The Governor himself has repeatedly explained the need for and expressed support for the significant new revenues needed to sustain Illinois financially. He has been criticized for failing to engineer support for those revenues from the General Assembly, but he at least was clear about the need and his own position. 

Interest groups, representatives of needy populations, and others will be making specific points about the decisions and priorities in the Governor’s actions to implement this budget. Those are important debates and worth close attention. Yet they have the feel of a desperate squabble over scraps. 

Most of the cuts in this budget are harmful and unwise. They are not driven by policy considerations or evidence-based program evaluations, but by the brutal calculus of the state’s fiscal default. These are the kinds of sorry, no-win decisions that must be made when the Legislature hands the Governor a budget with a shortfall that is HALF of the needed money. The truth is that the budget does not contain the resources to ensure that the items not being cut will in fact be paid for. Some will, some will not. All will have to wait far too long. 

The bigger picture here is that the crisis cries out for responsible leadership and a comprehensive solution that includes adequate new revenues. An election season is not the time to hide from responsibility, take shelter behind a self-justifying poll (“my poll says my constituents do not want to pay higher taxes”), or blithely assert with no specifics that there is a magic way the crisis can be solved without new revenues. It is the time to tell the truth, to teach the constituency what is needed to solve a historic crisis, and then to lead the effort to win it. Illinois voters are capable of adult decisions--nobody wants to pay higher taxes, but most will understand the need. A comprehensive solution is one that puts in place the revenue infrastructure to navigate through the crisis over at least two years. A comprehensive solution will include pain--we have that part already--but it must also avoid making unwise and harmful cuts to essential services. And it must have adequate new revenues to back up strategic borrowing that is also needed to get through the crisis.

For now, we have the embarrassing and sad spectacle of the distribution of scraps and the dismantling of important policies and programs by default. Illinois needs a responsible budget that stops cutting vital programs, meets the state’s needs, keeps the state’s promises, and pays the state’s bills.   

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Los Angeles Times recently posted an oddly inviting “state budget balancer" that allows you to have a go at balancing California’s $26 billion budget deficit by clicking on services to cut or items to tax. The “deficit meter” keeps track of how well you’ve done at solving the state’s massive budget shortfall at each click. Other states and cities have these online budget balancing tools as well—for example, in New Jersey, there’s the “You Be the Governor” challenge; for a crack at the federal deficit, see the American Public Media’s flashy “Budget Hero”.

Of course, the consequences of states’ fiscal distress are more complex and varied than these simplistic tools reflect. Among the consequences is an increase in demand for help from legal aid programs when people lose access to vital services (such as those available for “cutting” in the “deficit meter”).

Budget-related advocacy is underway across the country to help those affected by fiscal cuts. For example, the California Budget Project has reported on “Assessing the Impact: How Proposed State Budget Cuts Would Affect Women in California and What You Can Do to Help.” In Illinois, the Responsible Budget Coalition has an ongoing campaign to “Save Our State”; the Shriver Center is an active member of the coalition. And, in the District of Columbia, the Legal Aid Society is urging an equitable approach to the District's fiscal crisis.

What can legal aid do about state budget cutbacks? This is one of the article topics suggested by a participant in an April 20th conference call sponsored by Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, a publication of the Shriver Center. Fifteen attorneys from eleven states offered ideas ranging from health care reform to obligor defenses in child support enforcement to medical-legal partnerships.

Which of these topics would you most like to see covered in an upcoming issue of Clearinghouse Review? Vote now in a new two-question survey. Or post your additional suggestions on the Shriver Center’s Facebook discussion page—we value your input!
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

When newly-installed Governor Quinn gave his budget address March 18, 2009, he put forth the case for a combination of budget cuts and tax increases necessary for the indebted state of Illinois to get through this devastating recession. Although he pushed this message throughout the legislative session and the Senate approved a substantial tax hike, in the end the budget signed into law on July 15 relies instead on borrowing and harsh cuts to essential services in Illinois.

In a year of many notorious firsts within Illinois politics, this year’s budget is unprecedented in many ways. It relies tremendously on borrowing, jeopardizing the state’s credit-worthiness and resulting in a massive projected deficit of $10 billion for next year. It grants the Governor unheard of discretion by appropriating lump sum amounts to agencies under his control and leaving up to him the decision as to which programs to cut, rather than providing line-by-line programmatic spending authority as in past years, in an attempt to push the blame for the required cuts onto him. To the devastation of the state’s most vulnerable, it makes deep cuts in many programs on which thousands of residents rely.

The full impact of this year’s budget will not be realized until the Governor and his agencies make the tough decisions the legislature chose not to make, deciding which programs will be fully funded, which will be cut, and which will be eliminated. But the ultimate impact of this budget will continue to be felt for years, as the state will cope with addictions that could have been treated, violence and homelessness that could have been prevented, and increased expenses from seniors forced into nursing homes.

Before this budget was even signed into law, the uncertainty caused by the failure to adopt a new budget before the start of the state’s fiscal year and the massive cuts being proposed led to hundreds of social service providers being laid off and thousands of Illinois residents in need of assistance being turned away. Since the adopted budget funds social services at about 85% of the Governor’s requested budget, which already contained cuts, more layoffs will occur and additional services will be cut. But the fight is not yet over. With continued advocacy by the thousands who have written letters, called legislators, attended rallies, and struggled to make their voices heard, the legislature will return in January to renewed cries for the tax increase the state so desperately needs. Perhaps then, when the cuts are real and the legislators see the suffering their cowardice created, they will step up and meet the needs of the people and state they supposedly serve.

To read the Shriver Center's complete analysis of  the Illinois State budget, click here.  

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

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.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks