Illinois: Land of Delinquents

City Journal reports:

Illinois hasn’t really balanced its budget since the tech-boom years of the late 1990s. Faced with a growing gap between revenue and spending, state lawmakers have resorted to borrowing money to pay for current operations. This borrowing can take unusual forms; sometimes, for example, Illinois simply stops paying its bills, sending IOUs to vendors, such as hospitals that provide Medicaid services, and to local governments and authorities. (As of March, Illinois had piled up over $8 billion in such unpaid bills, and the governor and legislature were squabbling over whether to borrow even more to pay them.) All this borrowing has added up: the state’s bond debt and unfunded pension liabilities have skyrocketed from $20 billion in 1998 to $126 billion by this July.

Technically, Illinois shouldn’t be able to amass such a heavy debt burden, since its laws, like most states’, require the state budget to be balanced yearly. The problem is that Illinois’ balanced-budget rule is full of loopholes.

Who could forget that Barack Obama did nothing to fight for reform when he was an Illinois State Senator?