Issue Position: State Debt

Issue Position

Illinois currently has nearly $27 billion outstanding in General Obligation bonds. That is $27 billion that the taxpayers of Illinois will have to repay in the future.

That figure of $27 billion of bonded indebtedness is nearly triple was it was just 7 short years ago.

Let's say that again … the State of Illinois has incurred bonded indebtedness of nearly $18 billion in just the past 7 years. This is bonded indebtedness that we, our children and our children's children will have to repay.

And the budget for the State of Illinois is in shambles. We are roughly $13 billion in the red on our operating budget.

Because of the fiscal mismanagement by our General Assembly and our Governor, the ratings agencies (Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch) have all given Illinois bonds the lowest rating of any state in the nation.

Yet despite the debt burden we already have, earlier this year the Illinois House of Representatives, including my opponent, voted to approve borrowing another $3.7 billion in borrowing.

This has got to stop. The State of Illinois has no rational plan on how to get out of its budget deficit and that brings into question how it plans to repay the mountain of debt we have incurred. The lack of a coherent plan is one of the key reasons why the rating agencies have rated Illinois bonds at the bottom of the barrel among the states.

The first step is to have the General Assembly pass a balanced budget, which it has not done for many years. I promise to vote against any budget that does not balance expenditures with estimated revenues.

Once the budget is balanced, we can lay out a logical plan on how to repay the debt we have incurred.

We should not borrow more money until we have a plan in place to get our fiscal house in order. No plan? No borrowing!

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