{"id":575515,"date":"2010-05-21T19:34:15","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T23:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c60fd53ef0134816a2d6f970c"},"modified":"2010-05-21T19:34:15","modified_gmt":"2010-05-21T23:34:15","slug":"quinn-says-lawmakers-shouldnt-be-irresponsible-on-pensions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/575515","title":{"rendered":"Quinn says lawmakers shouldn&#8217;t be &#8216;irresponsible&#8217; on pensions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Posted by Rick Pearson<\/em> at 6:30 p.m.<br \/><\/br><\/p>\n<p>Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn today said it would be \u201cirresponsible\u201d for lawmakers to defer until next year a required $3.8 billion payment to Illinois&#8217; public pension systems when they return to Springfield next week to put together a budget.<\/p>\n<p>But Quinn declined to say what he&#8217;d do if legislators decide to put off the pension payment. The state $is 13 billion in debt and lawmakers &#8212; particularly Republicans &#8212; are reluctant to borrow money to make the pension payment for a second consecutive year.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>\u201cThis is a moment of truth for the next week for the members of the Illinois General Assembly,\u201d Quinn said during an appearance on \u201cThe Steve Cochran Show\u201d on WGN-AM (720).<\/p>\n<p><\/br>\u201cI would say that we need some fortitude here and some common sense,\u201d the governor said. \u201cIf legislators just want to kick and the can down the road and not deal with fundamental problems that affect the people of Illinois, they\u2019re not living up to their responsibility.\u201d<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Without naming names but clearly pointing at his Republican governor foe, Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington, Quinn said it wouldn\u2019t be fiscally prudent to force the pension systems to divest long-term assets to cover costs instead of borrowing money to make the payment.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>\u201cThere\u2019s some legislators out there running around saying don\u2019t do this (borrowing),\u201d Quinn said. \u201cWell, they\u2019re fiscally irresponsible and the bottom line is that\u2019s going to end up costing millions and millions of more dollars than we should have to pay.\u201d<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>When lawmakers left the Capitol on May 7 without a final budget plan, some of them contended the proposed spending outline too heavily favored education at the expense of human service programs. Since that time, Quinn has been regularly meeting with legislators.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>\u201cI think basically legislators felt they wanted to make sure these fundamental programs were protected and I think I\u2019ve made it pretty clear that\u2019s where I\u2019m coming from as well,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope we can pass a budget that probably will not be perfect but it has to be good enough to move our state forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Posted by Rick Pearson at 6:30 p.m. Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn today said it would be \u201cirresponsible\u201d for lawmakers to defer until next year a required $3.8 billion payment to Illinois&#8217; public pension systems when they return to Springfield next week to put together a budget. But Quinn declined to say what he&#8217;d do if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3992,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3992"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}