Dec. 05--What didn't Bruce Rauner know and when didn't he know it?
That was the question on my mind when I heard the governor-elect express considerable dismay earlier this week about the "fundamentally dishonest" state budget he is about to inherit.
In May, lawmakers "just kept spending high, and they allocated expenses from this fiscal year into last year to use the money to cover expenses, not to pay down the bills," he told reporters during a stop at the Capitol on Tuesday. "It makes it look like this year's expenses are lower when they're not."
He added, "The other thing that they did is, they did short-term borrowing from special-purpose funds (that) has to be repaid in 18 months."
Rauner provided a fact sheet showing several other ways in which the Democratically controlled General Assembly employed accounting tricks and fiscal misdirection to pass a budget that, to put it charitably, deferred a number of difficult choices until after the November election.
Surprised?
You might be.
Budget wrangles can be dense, riddled with assumptions, projections, deferrals and jargon.
Here, for instance, is a passage from Rauner's fact sheet that I had to read about four times: "$600 m in FY15 Medicaid costs were paid with a supplemental appropriation in FY14. The $600 million was pulled out of FY 15, lowering the FY15 spending number, and placed into FY14."
Even if you have the expertise to read government budget documents, you might not have the time or interest to hunt through them for cynical ploys or time bombs.
Bruce Rauner is almost certainly not surprised.
I say this not just because he's a wildly successful venture capitalist with an MBA from Harvard who plainly knows his way around a spreadsheet. Not just because he had a robust campaign staff to help him pore over the numbers, all of which are and have been available online. Not just because Illinois Senate Republicans issued a memo in early July blasting the new budget for "using one-time revenues, pushing off bills and relying on optimistic revenue projections."
I say this not just because the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability published a revised report , also in July, that described with cold numbers the cliff over which Illinois will plunge in January without an extension of higher income tax rates. And not just because the Civic Federation released a well-publicized 77-page report in October that outlined the very same "gimmicks" in the budget that are allegedly now gobsmacking and flabbergasting Rauner.
I say this also because Rauner, on the last day of May, ripped the spending plan as "phony" and "the same type of broken, dishonest budget that career politicians in Illinois have been passing for years."
Yet Tuesday he told reporters that "the deficit is far worse than has been discussed."
Really? What didn't Rauner know and when didn't he know it? When I asked my admittedly ironic question to a spokesman for Rauner's transition team, he had no answer but promised that "in the weeks ahead, additional budget issues will be detailed showing the depths of Illinois' financial problems."
The "If only I'd known how bad it really was!" pose from newly elected pols trying to lower the expectations of those who actually believed their commercials is always galling. But it's especially galling here, given that Rauner spent much of the last year refusing to answer with any specificity questions about how he plans to address Illinois' deep financial problems.
"We'll be discussing solutions to fix our problems in the coming weeks and months," he said Tuesday, continuing the theme of "in due time" that frustrated those of us who've been skeptical of his campaign promises. "Today we're focused on communicating to the voters what our challenges are, where the problems are, where the dishonesty has been."
Well, we know at least one place where the dishonesty has been.
