AP Photo. “The new governor promised to shake up Springfield—but now all of Illinois is feeling shaken.”
This man is ruining the entire state just so he can bust up the unions and forfeit the pension owed to state employees. He thinks he can force through his plan to make the rich richer. It isn’t working, and the people of Illinois are paying the price. Here is a clip from the article:
By CAROL FELSENTHAL | October 22, 2015
Bruce Rauner didn’t seem Wednesday like a man much concerned with getting his way: The Illinois governor visited Rend Lake College in Ina, Illinois, the Elks Lodge in Mt. Vernon, the Marion Chamber of Commerce, the Marion Junior High School and 17th St. BBQ in Murphysboro, a popular downstate destination that served a whole hog at his inauguration earlier this year. At nearly every stop, his topic was the same: Illinois needs big changes.
“We have not created a single net new job in 16 years. Think about that. Sixteen years,” Rauner told reporters during his stop in Marion. “And in the meantime our
Medicaid spending has bloomed by triple. Our pension payments have gone up almost ten times. And meanwhile a flat line to down on jobs.”Just a year ago, Rauner was campaigning against the “knuckleheads” in government and promising that he’d “shake up Springfield.” Now, after emerging from a bitter fourway primary and squeaking into the governor’s mansion with 50.3 percent of the vote in November, the wealthy venture capitalist has delivered on that promise— Springfield is shaken up and the state is locked into one of its bitterest political fights in a generation. It’s a fight that has brought into stark relief the massive budgetary problems facing Illinois—an $8 billion deficit and both the lowest credit rating and worst-funded pension system in the nation.
Read more at Politico
World News Forum 
Thank you so much for sharing this with World News Forum. I spent a couple of hours reading and editing this post last night. It’s one of the best things I’ve read this week.
My philosophy regarding this site has always been to run it like a newspaper, where I’m Perry White and authors like you are the superheroes/reporters. It’s a workable paradigm.
Governor Bruce Rauner has a bad case of the GOP disease: He has an idea about what the problems are, but he has no clues as to what the causes might be, nor does he have any solutions.
A typical modern conservative thinker–now, there’s an oxymoron if ever I saw one–Governor Rauner is someone who understands, rhetorically, at least, that a lack of jobs is an economic problem. Duh. And then, like a typical Republican ideologue, he proposes measures that destroy even more jobs while opposing measures that have been proven to create jobs.
He should be all for cutting wasteful spending and raising taxes on the super rich. Paying state employees a living wage and guaranteed pensions is not a waste of money.
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Exactly, kl. Rauner has it exactly backwards. But then he is one of the super rich, not at all acquainted with economics, the middle class that powers the economy. He doesn’t care about what happens to the truly needy among us, as seen by the cuts that have already gone through as a result of this budget impasse.
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I really enjoyed this post, too, because I came away feeling better educated about the current state of American politics.
The Koch brothers managed to help elect their partisans to numerous governorships during the last few election cycles. And as you know, taking over state governments as an avenue to attacking the federal government has been their key strategy of late. And the results have been disastrous.
The good news about these epic failures of economic policy is that they have provided a redundancy of illustrative examples of the bankruptcy of “tea party” economic notions.
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