The thing to worry about is the prevailing attitude of taxing rather than cutting budgets can spread quickly. It’s a magnification of the long-standing way of doing business in Illinois, which is to spend first and find ways to pay later. The danger is in not recognizing when people have reached a saturation point. When that happens, the end result is regressive. Existing businesses leave, new businesses go elsewhere and cash-strapped taxpayers clinch the purse-strings a little tighter.

Comment: Now the highest in the country. Another $450 million or so will go down the pension drain, as we wrote here yesterday.

Comment: But a strong effort is underway to penalize cheap energy in favor of more alertnatives at a multi-billion dollar cost that nobody is even measuring, which we wrote about here.

Lawmakers return to the Capitol with a deadline today to override Rauner’s budget vetoes, but that’s unlikely to happen unless House Democrats stick together. Instead, Senate Democrats are poised to send the governor a temporary, one-month budget that would pay worker salaries and fund sensitive areas such as mental health treatment and tracking of sex offenders.

Under cost-cutting measures imposed by Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration effective July 1, the state’s child care assistance program has been effectively closed to nearly all new enrollees.