Gov. JB Pritzker has said it before: state government has been hollowed out. But the state keeps spending more and more every year with next fiscal year's budget supported by billions of dollars in borrowing.
“This is not a time for governments, state governments particularly, to be cutting services, especially a government like ours where agencies have been hollowed out over a number of years,” Pritzker said.
The budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1 spends about what the soon-to-end budget spent, $40 billion in state funds. That’s the highest spending for the state after years of spending increases. The budget lawmakers passed onto the governor is based on borrowing from the Federal Reserve to cover billions in state spending despite a crater in tax revenue from the government-imposed COVID-19 shutdown.
“What we’d like to do is maintain state government as it is, again still hollowed out to some degree as it has been over the years, and then we’ll manage through as the next month or so revealed whether the federal government will step up,” Pritzker said.
Friday, Pritzker was asked if there’s been a hollowing, why is government spending increasing.
“There are many more authorized employees than there are actual employees, and there are many fewer authorized employees than there are in prior years,” Pritzker said.
Wirepoints President Ted Dabrwoski said numbers he reviewed tell a different story.
“The people who are being hollowed out are the private sector who struggle to make ends meet,” Dabrwoski said. “And especially now with COVID-19, over a million without jobs, it’s making it really hard for them to function when in fact they have to keep paying for a government when they refuse to downsize, or at least right-size itself and make itself more affordable to the people who have to pay for it.”
Dabrowski said Wirepoints' review of Illinois jobs data from the past year, April to April, shows leisure and hospitality took the biggest hit, losing more than 300,000 jobs. There were major losses in other private industries as well. Overall, nonfarm payroll is down 13 percent.
“The government sector is protected,” Dabrowski said. “They’re getting raises, they’re getting cost of living raises, they’re getting bigger step increases and yet the private sector who’s been slashed has to keep paying for that and more.”
There’s no shared sacrifice, Dabrowski said, as the cost of government employees continues to grow.
“And Gov. Pritzker has done nothing to slow those things down,” Dabrowski said. “In fact, he wants to see tax hikes from the same people who are struggling in order to pay for those protected government jobs.”
Driving a lot of the state’s cost is pensions for state government retirees. The looming state budget spends $10 billion, or about a quarter of state spending, on pensions. That’s a fraction of the nearly $140 billion unfunded pension liability.