“He said to me, ‘Well, don’t you want the revenue?’ And I said, ‘Frankly, no’,” Blagojevich said. “It’s going to get in the way of the kinds of things that we want to do. We’ll never get the cuts in some of the places we want to get cuts. We won’t be able to downsize where we want to downsize. We won’t be able to make a lot of the hard decisions that I think are necessary to get the budgets in a better position.”
The problem is that the cuts are endangering public lands, continuing the problem in public education and avoiding dealing with a problem that hasn’t fully hit Illinois as it has other states: Medicaid and CHIP.
I’ll give you a way to demagogue on the issue and still deal with funding–dedicate funding, document the amounts and whenever anyone tries to divert it, have a press conference about it. But insisting that further funding is the problem (a separable issue from gaming expansion in many ways) doesn’t work at those problems.
To the credit of the administration–there is a line that says they are thinking about management issues:
Deputy governor Bradley Tusk said the administration had examined structures of similar boards in other states, including the possibility of a full-time paid board. The “unfortunate answer,” he said, is “there’s no system that seems to work any better.”
Comparative studies are great and I’m all for them–they are good for business after all (my business for those who don’t get the joke), but you have to have a functioning board in the meantime.