American Rescue Plan FAQ: Illinois
Release: July 12, 2021
On March 11, 2021, the Biden Administration secured passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (“ARPA”), which provides fiscal relief designed to counter economic issues created by the pandemic. ARPA is considerable in size and provides a total of $1.9 trillion in federal aid for state and local governments to use to support the provision of various core public services such as healthcare, human services, and education, as well as to infrastructure.
Given the significant federal aid flowing through ARPA, CTBA has compiled the following answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about that legislation and how it will impact Illinois.
Impact on Illinois' Structural Deficit
Release: October 21, 2019
The state of Illinois faces a significant structural deficit into the future. The report highlights the nature of the structural deficit and identifies two key causes: the state’s historically flawed tax policy and the plan devised for repayment of Illinois’ pension debt. CTBA proposes both the adoption of the Fair Tax and a reamortization of the pension debt as described in the report titled: Addressing Illinois’ Pension Debt Crisis With Reamortization. Doing so would allow the State to ensure full funding for the Evidence Based Funding Formula while also improving the status of Illinois’ public employee pension system and eliminating the State’s structural deficit by 2042.
Governor Rauner's FY2019 General Fund Budget Proposal Neither Balances Nor Addresses Long-Term Structural Fiscal Issues
Release: May 24, 2018
Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 marks the fourth General Fund Budget proposed by Governor Bruce Rauner. For the first two years of Governor Rauner’s administration, FY2016 and FY2017, the state went without a full General Fund Budget. That gave Illinois the dubious honor of going the longest that any state in the country had ever gone without a budget. This budget impasse led to an explosion in the state’s deficit under Governor Rauner’s watch. The state’s backlog of bills was $5.97 billion on July 1, 2015, when the impasse began.
Turnaround Fact Sheet #1: Workers' Compensation
Release: March 16, 2017
This is the first in a series of CTBA Fact Sheets reviewing the proposals in Governor Bruce Rauner's "Turnaround Agenda," which the Governor's office has made a precondition of signing any state budget.
Illinois on Autopilot, the Reality of FY2016
Release: February 16, 2016
In both magnitude and meaning, state elected officials have no greater obligation than passing a General Fund budget into law. Consider magnitude first. Last fiscal year the General Fund budget provided for the expenditure of $35 billion. No question, that constitutes a sizeable expenditure of taxpayer money. It is also meaningful. While nearly $11 billion was targeted for Hard Costs like debt service and other legally mandated payments, over $24 billion was invested in current services across communities statewide. In fact, over 90 percent of FY2015 General Fund expenditures on services covered education (35 percent), healthcare (30 percent), human services (21 percent), and public safety (7 percent). To be clear, it is those services which provide for the basic health and well-being of the citizenry, and go to the very heart of why we elect a Governor and General Assembly in the first place.
By failing to pass a General Fund budget for FY2016, elected officials are basically punting the following difficult, but fundamental, responsibilities to:
- Make decisions about how to allocate scarce resources among the aforesaid four service priorities;
- Identify which of, and by how much, those services will be cut, despite their high priority, if the state’s current woeful fiscal condition is not addressed; or
- Raise the tax revenue needed to fund those core services to the amounts needed to satisfy demographically driven demand.