Chicago Public Schools failed to pay in full the $733 million pension payment that was due June 30, instead making a partial payment of $464 million, even after taking out a $387 million loan from JPMorgan.
The Illinois House of Representatives has completed an override of Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of a budget plan, including multibillion-dollar tax increases.
Medicaid has ballooned to cover more than a quarter of Illinois’ population, with spending at $5.4 billion, up 141 percent 2015 compared with 2000. Now that a federal judge has ruled Illinois must speed up its Medicaid payments, the state’s Medicaid payment will increase $83 million each month, for a total monthly payment of $376 million.
Though the Illinois House of Representatives appears close to overriding Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of a tax hike budget plan, and thereby ending Illinois’ more than two years without a full-year budget, Moody’s Investors Service has said it might still downgrade the state’s credit, largely due to Illinois’ unsustainable debt.
In two separate deals with JPMorgan, CPS borrowed $387M to make a teacher pension payment at end of June and as a result of the deal, will accumulate at least $7M in interest.
Illinois universities have hiked tuition and relied on state subsidies to pay for exorbitant administrative salaries — and now credit rating agencies are punishing them for that destructive behavior.
Chicago’s $1.15 billion projected budget gap is the latest in a decades-long string of structural deficits. Making Chicago’s high taxes worse is not the solution.