The Allegory of Bad Government

10:50 pm, 2/12/08

The Allegory of Bad Government

The house that Rod built is made of cards, and may be collapsing soon.

[Illinois State Comptroller Dan] Hynes on Monday released a "special report" on state finances that predicted sales-tax and corporate income-tax collections will continue to decrease. That, in turn, could further delay state payments to Medicaid providers, prompting them to stop serving the poor because they can't afford to wait more time to be paid.

"The fiscal outlook for Illinois is not optimistic," Hynes says.

"I don't think there's any more latitude in terms of pushing [Medicaid] bills off," he told the Sun-Times' editorial board. "Providers are starting to say 'We've had enough.' They're starting to walk away."

Longtime readers know that almost as long as this blog has existed, I've been warning everyone who'll listen that this was the inevitable outcome of the Blagojevich administration. The State of Illinois didn't have enough money to pay it's bills when Blagojevich was elected, and knowing that the state was already falling into a black hole, certainly aware of that economic slowdown that's been predicted for years, he constructed expensive new programs around populist nonsense, held the legislature hostage even as other Chicago Democrats tried to stop him, and brutalized the economy with countless new taxes, fees and arbitrary regulatory burdens, the worst of which, a $7.6 billion gross receipts tax, was mercifully shot down by a unanimous vote in the Illinois House. This, as he illegally siphoned money from special funds and private endowments to cover the shortfall, as millions of dollars went out the door to various politically favorable causes and ethically dubious "consultants" and lumbering bureaucracies supposedly tasked with trying to figure out why the state was losing money, while Blagojevich praised himself for fighting Springfield's culture of "failure and mediocrity" and compared his struggle to that of Abraham Lincoln.

If the Governor is right, that his electorate doesn't feel that his incompetence and corrupt, criminalistic nature is "relevant to their lives", maybe they'll consider it "relevant" when state services begin grinding to a halt entirely.

Perhaps Illinois Democrats have finally elected a governor who can give them a beautiful death. (Via Reverse Spin)