Editorial: 'At least we have a budget' is small consolation for Illinois

Illinois lawmakers worked into the wee hours over the Memorial Day holiday weekend to produce a pandemic-era spending plan for the coming year that House Majority Leader Greg Harris, a Chicago Democrat, acknowledged "may not be the world's best budget." In a state with a $138 billion-and-counting public pension shortfall and near junk bond credit status, it's hard to imagine what a good budget would look like, so a fair assessment of the product of lawmakers' labors has to take into account what little they had to work with. Even so, there's plenty in the plan approved Sunday and headed for the governor's promised signature to earn that "not the best" ranking.

Start with spending about $2 billion more than the nearly $41 billion in the current-year budget. Supporters - almost all Democrats since the budget was approved along party lines in both chambers - describe the budget as a "maintenance" plan since most categories get no more money next year than they got this year. Still, a nearly 5 percent increase hardly qualifies as holding the line.

Democrats said the increases were needed in specific areas particularly affected by the pandemic or the response to it. The Department of Public Health, for example, will get a budget increase of about $900 million - nearly half of that extra $2 billion - because of its obvious role on the front line of fighting the coronavirus crisis.

It's hard to quibble with the need to fund hospitals and health workers in the grip of a global pandemic, but it's also hard to consider it quibbling when you're talking about $2 billion - or even $900 million.

We can't escape the feeling that - as is true nearly every year - lawmakers just didn't have the resourcefulness or the energy to tackle the big challenges at the heart of the state's approach to financial management. Central among those challenges, of course, is that ominous, dare we say ravenous, pension problem. Lawmakers agreed to meet the state's minimum commitment to pension funds, but it takes an especially optimistic spirit to find cause for celebration in paying what you agreed to toward a problem that is worsening badly by the day.

And the acknowledged triple elephants in this room - a prayer for $6 billion from the federal government, an expected $5 billion federal loan and some disputed billions more from a questionable graduated income tax proposal that voters haven't even approved yet - only add to the foreboding discomforts of this picture.

In a four-day session crippled by pandemic-related restrictions in both their working environment and the material they had to work with, perhaps it is a positive to acknowledge, as Harris did, that "at least we have a budget." It's a sad commentary on the state of financial planning in Illinois that even that minimalist objective hasn't been achieved in some recent years.

Still, we take no pleasure in a budget of which the most charitable assessment is that it may not be the world's worst. And, if this is how our leaders budget in the midst of unprecedented uncertainty and risk, we shudder to think what that means for future spending plans.