From Chicago – Shelia Weinberg, the founder of the nonprofit, Truth In Accounting, talks with the Illinois Channel on the report her group just released, in which they ranked the 50 states for fiscal soundness. Weinberg tells the Illinois Channel that Illinois has improved in some areas, but still fails to properly account for all its costs — noting they fail to account for $35 billion in healthcare costs.
The lack of proper accounting of costs, is a major reason the state has contined to dig deeper in the hole financially. Weinberg tells us that as bad as the problem is with the state, when we add in the per-taxpayer cost of other government entities, like Chicago, Cook County, the Chicago Public Schools and others — the actual cost of paying off these debts is far greater than the state’s assets. In this campaign season, taxpayers need to understand what is the nature of the problem, before they can begin to know if any viable solutions are actually being proposed by the political class.
