With the state legislature and the Governor still at stalemate on the budget negotiations in Springfield, Micheal Lucci (Lew-Chee) with the business oriented Illinois Policy Institute says the budget problems in the short term are due to the fact that pensions consume 25% of the budget.
But in the long term, the root problem is job loss and population loss in Illinois.
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The legislature has to decide whether to take a short term approach to the budget and just raise taxes and make some cuts… Or address the long term drivers of population and job loss.
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Last year Illinois lost 95,000 people, over the past two decades about a million people left the state and haven’t been replaced by increased births.. The result is a declining tax base, reducing tax receipts by hundreds of millions a year.