"Jane the Actuary" insists she derives little fulfillment from the act of legislators in the General Assembly recently passing the first full budget ahead of a new financial year of the administration of Gov. Bruce Rauner.
Both chambers recently passed a new $38.5 billion spending plan with few dissenters, and the anonymous blogger who describes herself as an actual "actuary working at a pension consulting firm," thinks each party may have been driven to their compromise by ulterior motives.
“The overwhelming vote margins illustrated a consensus that neither Democrats who control the General Assembly nor Republicans allied with the governor wanted to go into the election season under the cloud of a budget stalemate like the one that consumed [the] state government for nearly two years until last July,” the author wrote in a recent blog post.
With Rauner having already signed the measure into law, lawmakers are wasting little time patting themselves on the back over their accomplishments, which Jane the Actuary argues is coming at the expense of taxpayers.
“Those *&^!-ing *&^!-ers in the legislature and senate are leading us further down the path to *&^!-ing bankruptcy with more accounting tricks and gimmicks to get them re-elected again in the meantime, relying on Illinois’ gerrymandering and voters’ gullibility and fatalism, and the knowledge that the bill will come due enough years in the future that they can *&^!-ing high-tail it out, or at any rate, rely on their *&^!-ing political connections to insulate them from the ultimate impact of higher taxes and reduced services,” she said in the blog post.
And critics argue that much can be deduced without so much as knowing everything that’s part of the full proposal.
“The full details of what they’re up to aren’t known yet, since this was another one of those instances of a budget delivered at the last minute without any public discussion before the vote,” Jane the Actuary added in her blog post.
What is certain is that the new budget fails to pay down the $6.6 billion that the state already owes in unpaid vendor debt.
The bill is also turning heads over the $172 million that is earmarked for the Obama Library, not to mention funding that is appropriated for the long-troubled and cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools.
Finally, the Illinois Policy Institute goes as far as to argue that the full and balanced budget proposal that has been signed into law may not be full and balanced at all.
Jane the Actuary points out that the institute estimates that the plan could be as much as $1.5 billion out of whack.
“This is not a ‘compromise’ budget,” she added. “This is not a budget in which hard decisions were made about where to spend and where to cut.”
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