While heading into the last week of their regular legislative session, Illinois lawmakers remain mired in the longest such standoff in its history, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. After leaving the government since June without a plan for what to spend and how, the Democrat-led legislature and Republican Governor Bruce Rauner have until May 31 to approve one by a majority vote. Prospects for an agreement between the two sides appear dim. House Speaker Michael Madigan (D) said that he told Rauner that the governor and “his agents are not being persuasive” in the groups working on a compromise and he plans to advance an appropriations bill. That proposal — which would run through June 2017 — is as much as $7 billion out of balance, according to the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget. If no deal is struck, the consequences will become more dire: Prisons may run out of food, schools may not open on time, and the state’s credit rating — already the lowest in the U.S. — is at risk of falling even further as the government’s deficit continues to grow. Wary of Illinois’s finances, investors demand yields of 3.4 percent on its 10-year bonds, about 1.8 percentage points more than top-rated debt, according to data compiled Bloomberg. That gap is up from as little as 1.1 percentage point two years ago.
