Email Address
One miracle, however, is insufficient to get Illinois out of the financial woods. After the defeat of Pritzker s proposed graduated income tax amendment, the state still has something in the order of a $3 billion annual structural budget deficit to fill, and how it gets filled (or somehow kicked down the road) is going to be quite a trick as Pritzker prepares for his 2022 re-election and the House struggles with selecting a speaker.
There are a couple of bright notes.
For one, Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza shrewdly used much of the federal borrowing to pay old Medicaid bills, an action that triggered an additional $1.5 billion in matching federal payments to the state. For another, the Commission on Government Forecasting & Accountability, the Legislature s fiscal research unit, says income tax revenues have risen more than $1.45 billion above budgeted levels in the first months of fiscal 2021. Though most of that was due to a one-time delay in payments intende