Your 2010 Republican Gov and Lite Guv Candidates Updated

Progress Illinois has some incredible videos up.

I kind of feel bad about the first one, but he is the Lite Guv candidate:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lICjD0aw9M[/youtube]

And he takes on the 10 percent cut idea (thanks to Dillard)

But here’s the Gov Candidate displaying incredible ignorance confidently:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpENAFj7CW8[/youtube]

BRADY: You can’t cut yourself out of the $10 to $13 billion [deficit] that they’ve accumulated in the Blagojevich/Quinn administration over the last eight years. So what we have to do is we have to reconcile ourselves into a budget that’s not just balanced but has a surplus so that we can begin paying down the backlog of unpaid bills that are referred to as the $13 billion deficit.

The statement above is verbal diarrhea and has no relation to reality.  The $10 – $13 billion includes the backlog of bills so what the hell he is talking about is anyone’s guess, but what is clear, he doesn’t have the first clue about the state budget.  The budget has to be balanced every year and it’s certainly true that for years we have been using gimmicks to do so.  One of the most popular is to roll bills over to the next fiscal year and count them in the new fiscal year.  He seems to think those debts aren’t included in the deficit, but they are.

One could argue he’s suggesting we need to reduce long term debt, but that doesn’t make any sense given what he said.  Debt maintenance is all part of the projections for the current deficit.  You could be talking about pension payments that have been shortchanged, but again, given what he said, that makes no sense.  Pension payments at the required level are included in the projections. It’s probably true that we need to make bigger pension payments, but that’s more than the current deficit projections.

The man isn’t a 27 year old guy who is probably in over his head and trying, he’s a long time elected who just demonstrated how totally clueless he is about the state budget.  It’s unclear if he understands even the difference between debt and deficit.

UPDATE:  Rich adds a very good couple points.

So, we can’t cut our way out of the deficit, but we can’t raise taxes. Instead, we need a budget surplus so that we can pay down the overdue bills.

OK, if we can’t cut our way out of this, how do we go about creating that surplus?

“Well, you do it the way businesses and families have done it. Every business and every family has had to deconstruct and reconstruct and reconcile its spending within its means.”

So, what about that ten percent across the board cut Brady proposed during the primary? Is that now “repurposed” as “deconstruction and reconstruction”?

We need a lot more details here or this can all be dismissed as mere pablum. Who gets deconstructed? Who gets reconstructed? Apparently, schools are not exempt…

The full Brady interview is here.

…Adding… The $13 billion deficit is not all “unpaid bills,” as Brady claims in that first quote. About half of it is unpaid bills, the other half is a structural problem. We’ve gone over this before with him, but he’s apparently not yet figured it out.

It’s so unclear what Brady is actually saying there, Rich’s points are essential too.  Cutting your way out, but then you have to create a surplus?  It’s contradictory.

But also, the structural issues in the budget are about half the problem, the leftover bills are the other half–for this year.  In one sense on can argue that we’d be half way there if we had fixed the leftover bills, but then we would have previously dealt with some of the structural issues as well.