A major credit rating agency has come out with a blunt assessment of Governor Bruce Rauner's proposed budget for Illinois.
The budget Rauner presented last week calls for massive cuts in state spending without any increase in taxes. Moody's Investor Service dismisses the chance that parts, let alone all, of the plan will ever become a reality. Moody's gives two reasons:
1)politics and 2) legal questions.
On the political side: Moody's notes Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly. And they won't like those deep cuts.
As for the legal questions, Moody's says Rauner's plan to change state pensions would surely be the subject of a lawsuit -- just like a different pension overhaul passed in 2013, which gets its date before Illinois' high court next month.