State Government Waste

Today more information about government waste in the office of Governor Blagojevich has come out. Today it turned out that the total bill from the lawsuit against the State law that total cost of defending the unconstitutional violent video game law that Governor Blagojevich introduced was not 500,000 dollars as his office previously claimed, but over 1 million dollars due to legal bill incurred by hiring lawyers to defend the Governor. The cost of the additional 500,000 dollars were charged to such varying departments as the Departments of Human Services, Children and Family Services, Public Health, Corrections, Revenue, and the State Police. What reason would there be for these departments to pay for the legal bills related to a video game law? The answer is there is no real reason, the reason that it happened this way was so that the Governor office could try and cover up the true cost of the law suit. So a bad law that should never have been passed, bug the Governor pushed through in order to try and win more support for his re-election bid ends up costing the tax payers over a million dollars.

Yesterday State House Speaker Mike Madigan indicated that there is not enough support to pass an increase in the state sales and income tax. Hopefully this mixed with the death of the Gross Receipts Tax will force the State General Assembly to look close at spending and cut back on needed spending and programs and inject some fiscal discipline into the state. If the state can not be responsible with what it is taking in now, why should they be trust with billions more of our dollars?