DeKalb Times

Illinois state Sen. Dave Syverson (R-Rockford) took to social media to discuss the recently approved budget for the 2023-2024 fiscal year.

“Here are my thoughts on the unbalanced, ‘balanced’ budget,” he said in a June 14 Facebook post.

The post included a video of Syverson’s statement.

“The Governor and the Democrats have been traveling around the state talking about how they’ve passed this balanced budget, but was it really balanced?” he said in the video. “There’s creative government budgeting and then there’s normal household and business budgeting that you and I have to follow. If we did budgeting like the government did, we’d probably end up in jail.”

Syverson explained how normal budgeting involves showing your annual revenue and expenses during a meeting with accountants, bankers or financial planners.

“You can’t say for example, ‘My revenue was $80,000, and my expenses for just six months of the year were $50,000, so you know, I’m ahead.,’” he said. “No. You can’t say to your banker, ‘Well, my income is $80,000 and if you total most of my expenses is $60,000, but there are some expenses we’re not going to include.’”

On June 7, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a $50.4 billion budget for the 2023-2024 fiscal year that begins July 1. The State Journal-Register highlighted investments in homelessness prevention and education while noting how Republicans disapproved of the budget for not including funding for AFSCME negotiations. But the report noted that the budget does in fact account for the contract.

“We built in what we thought might be the appropriate amount of money for what we expect from that AFSCME negotiation,” Pritzker said in the Journal-Register report. “So that’s in the budget already. That’s a you know, once again, one of those false things that Republicans like to say about the budget, but it is in the budget.”

Syverson gave examples that he said showed the budget is not balanced.

“1. Start programs after 6 months so only half the cost shows up—for example, in the Medicaid line, they have about $400m of new programs that they’re starting halfway into the year, when the real cost of the program is $800 million,” he said in the video. 2. “They put nothing into the budget for the pay raises that are being negotiated. That’s supposed to be between $200 and $300 million. 3. Healthcare for undocumented residents. They only put $500m into the budget when the real cost of the program is over a billion dollars. They’re underestimating the costs. When they say it’s a $100 million surplus, it’s really over a $1 billion deficit.”