The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor

A primer for idiots who refuse to understand Illinois’ money crisis

Leslie Munger, former Illinois Comptroller in “Cooking Up An Illinois Budget Disaster,” tries to get through to the blockheads who seem comfortable with the direction that the state is heading: a financial boneyard. Or the partisan politicians and journalists who try to ignore the hell that awaits.

Leslie Munger

In the simplest “kitchen table” terms, she describes the state’s nearly unrecoverable financial crisis and how Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s graduated income tax proposal is a fool’s tale.

She relates, for example, how the Democratic-run Illinois Legislature made sure they would get their annual $1,800 pay raise, while stiffing vendors, hospitals, social welfare and health care providers who have submitted to the state some 73,000 bills totaling nearly $5 billion.

Here’s the set-up:

It’s hard for most of us to understand how a state with annual revenues of nearly $37 billion – or a little over $100 million per day — never seems to have enough money to pay its bills. It’s easier to understand if we take six zeros off all the numbers and think of the Illinois budget as if it were our own.

Imagine you are sitting down at your kitchen table to pay your bills. You open your checkbook and see you have about $100 bucks ($100,000,000, less six zeros). You take a peek at the huge pile of bills waiting to be paid. They add up to about $5,000 (the state currently has over 73,000 bills totaling nearly $5,000,000,000 waiting for payment). Some have to be paid today. Can’t be late. No exceptions. You know you spent more last month, but those bills haven’t shown up in your mailbox just yet. But they will, and they’ll have to be paid too.