By: Mark Glennon*
So much baloney in an interview of just 18 minutes makes this worth going through in full.
Illinois Deputy Governor Andy Manar went on Tom Miller’s WJPF show Thursday to respond to an appearance two days before by Wirepoints’ Ted Dabrowski. The topics were Illinois’ underwater unemployment insurance trust fund and other budget matters.
Manar did no favors for himself or Gov. JB Pritzker’s Administration, being deceitful, to put it kindly. His actual goal seemed to be to discredit Wirepoints.
Judge for yourself. Below are the primary points Manar made and links to the full interviews follow.
Miller walked Manar through the same topics he talked to Dabrowski about earlier.
Originally, Dabrowski criticized how lawmakers ignored Illinois’ unemployment insurance trust fund, which borrowed $4.4 billion from the federal government to cover jobless claims, an unaddressed debt that remains to be paid. We’ve written earlier about that here, as have many others.
Nothing unusual, claimed Manar. Illinois is merely among “maybe two dozen” states that borrowed from the federal government to shore up their unemployment trust funds. Illinois is therefore “not in a different category or an outlier,” said Manar. About two dozen other states are in the “same position we are.”
Not true. For starters, all but ten states have repaid what their unemployment funds borrowed, and Illinois is among the five states with the most borrowed per capita.
But its worse than just the federal loans, and Manar ignored the additional amounts. Illinois also depleted nearly the entire $1.5 billion balance that was in its unemployment fund at the start of the pandemic. That was too low even then, and it’s gone now.
Be aware that this is a topic Pritzker himself already lied about. In July he was asked by Capitol News Illinois about why the state was not restoring the unemployment fund by using American Rescue Plan money, which was the prudent thing many other states did or are doing now. Pritzker claimed that it was not legally allowed and that “all across the nation there are states that owe billions of dollars in deficits…”
Both claims were patently false, as we detailed here.
Manar then resorted to an ad hominem shot at Wirepoints. “I just put this into that category of… Wirepoints, which I don’t even know what the organization is. Frankly, I think it’s a partisan organization. It certainly isn’t a, you know, a credible news organization… They’re looking for something to talk about because we have a lot of good news to tell the people of the state of Illinois about the state finances. We are on the right track in so many regards, especially to just where we were a few years ago.”
Manar can look at our About page if he doesn’t know who we are. It’s pretty simple. If he wants more, he should know we are funded by readers who tell us constantly that they are fed up with politicians who don’t tell them the truth, and our readers like us for calling that out.
What’s most egregious is that Illinois simply pretended in its budgeting that the unemployment fund problem does not exist. The federal loan and the rest of the unemployment fund’s deficit are ignored in both the current budget and the five-year budget projection recently published by the Pritzker Administration. But the entire hole will have to be filled, either by higher taxes on employers, lower unemployment benefits or cash from other state sources.
Miller then asked Manar about a special fund quietly put in the recent budget that allows Pritzker to spend what may be as much as $3 billion of federal relief money – all at his own discretion. Dabrowski had criticized the scheme during his interview.
Manar resorted again to an ad hominem attack on Wirepoints. “We go back to an organization that, I think, frankly is looking for a problem because they’re frustrated that they wake up every day, drink a cup of coffee and they see all this good news about the state finances.”
In truth, it wasn’t even Wirepoints that reported the story of the special fund.
It was the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune followed up with an editorial criticizing the fund and calling for more transparency in it. The sole article we did on it complimented the Tribune’s reporter who wrote the story and we summarized his findings.
Manar insisted that the governor’s special fund is transparent. “There’s full transparency about how it’s spent,” he said. “That was something that we requested and the governor said we need to make sure that we have an accounting of every dollar spent for federal funds coming during this very difficult and challenging. It’s complete nonsense.”
Tell that to the Tribune. The very existence of the fund was hidden, no specific appropriation was made and no further input from the legislature is required on how it gets spent.
As the Tribune described it, “no mention was made of any kind of state fund that would permit the governor to spend a chunk of the federal cash exactly as he wished, without any kind of approval or even input from state lawmakers — or the public for that matter. It never came up in committee sessions or on the House floor.”
Finally, the Tribune editorial said that none of whatever Pritzker has done right “excuses the opacity that the Pritzker administration has draped over its handling of President Joe Biden’s ARPA money. Illinoisans across the state should be incensed,” the Tribune’s editorial said.
In any case, transparency is not the only issue. The bigger matter is that Pritzker was given the unilateral power to spend billions of dollars with no legislative input.
What about the recent Kiplinger report concluding that Illinois is the least tax-friendly state in America for middle-class families? Miller asked for Manar’s reaction to that.
First, Manar tried to blame local governments. “A big piece of that is property taxes,” he said, “which of course you know the state doesn’t get a dime of in terms of revenue. That’s all locally driven and run by local units of government and locally elected officials. So a big piece of that, in my assessment, deals with things outside of the state’s purview.”
All locally driven decisions? No. Unfunded mandates imposed by the state are strangling local governments. Their largest problem, pension cost, is entirely dictated by the state. Same with one-sided collective bargaining rules – some of the most union-friendly in the country – that leave local officials with no serious ability to control costs.
Manar then said he didn’t want to “dust up the debate that we had over the fair tax,” but proceeded to do just that. Part of the problem in Illinois, he said, “is that we have a flat tax, which means the disproportionate share goes on working people.”
The fair tax, however, would have done nothing for the middle-class tax burden addressed by Kiplinger. The specific tax rates passed by the legislature that would have become effective had the fair tax passed included only token cuts, if any, for some lower income groups, but huge increases for the big earners. Voters killed the proposal because they saw through it for what it was – just another tax increase, about $3.4 billion worth. That defeated tax increase is what Manar laments.
Finally, Miller asked Manar about a report by Pew Charitable Trusts showing Illinois to be second worst, behind only New Jersey, in the gap between its revenue and what it spends, which has persisted for at least 15 years.
Manar dodged the Pew issue by ticking off a list of supposed accomplishments on the budgetary front that have us on a better path: Illinois’ unpaid bills dropped from $16 billion to $4 billion; Pritzker cut spending by more than more than $700 million in 2020; Illinois has gotten two credit upgrades; we’ve paid back short-term borrowing that was in place. That means Illinois is on a new, better path, Manar said.
Once again, he added an ad hominem. “I mean, that’s hard empirical evidence of good management of government finance, and I know that’s hard for people at Wirepoints and the Illinois Policy Institute to accept, because their existence is based off of peddling information they got a footing on during the Rauner Administration that brought us to the brink of insolvency.”
Sorry to break it to Manar, but we were harsh critics of Rauner’s tenure as governor as you can see here, here, here and in many other columns. Personally, I was optimistic about Rauner initially, but my opinions changed after he took office. Efforts to blame most of Illinois’ problems on Rauner, however, are demonstrably silly, as we explained here and here.
Regarding the “empirical evidence” Manar says Wirepoints ignores, most of his claims are highly misleading. For example, the state issued $6 billion in bonds in order to pay down the unpaid bills, essentially just moving debt from one account to another. We won’t try to summarize here the many columns we have written about other progress claimed by the Pritzker Administration, but a few of those articles are linked below.
Suffice it to say that Illinois is temporarily floating on a bubble of federal money – over $180 billion in aid to the public and private sectors – which has helped spike tax revenues. It will not be sustained. When it’s over, Illinois will be left with the deep, structural fiscal crisis it had before the federal bailout.
Manar got one thing right, which is that at Wirepoints we wake up frustrated every morning. But he sure got the reason wrong. We are truly overwhelmed by the dishonesty, incompetence, and hypocrisy we see in each morning’s news about government, particularly in Washington, the State of Illinois and Chicago. We wish we could cover more of it.
Read more about Illinois’ dire fiscal situation:
- Gov. Pritzker: The man with two budget faces
- Illinois’ crisis: 20 facts Pritzker doesn’t want ordinary Illinoisans to know
- Tribune Report: Legislature Gave Pritzker Power To Spend Billions Without Its Input
- New Kiplinger report crowns Illinois as nation’s “Least Tax-Friendly State” for middle-class families
- Illinois Comptroller: Moving Debt From One Credit Card To Another Is ‘A Win Win Win’
- Pritzker’s Latest, Blatant Whoppers
- Illinois pension shortfall surpasses $500 billion, average debt burden now $110,000 per household
- Gov. Pritzker can’t take credit for Illinois’ improved budget projections when it’s the feds that bailed the state out
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
Mark Glennon, they are simply pissed off that you exist and you exist to post truth, facts and historical evidence. These folks would be happy if you and Mr. Ted simply pulled out and left the state and stopped your drawing attention to their lack of proper governance.
The shell game they play is obvious.
Keep up the good work. I’m sending you another donation. God bless you all in Wirepoints.
Thing be with you.
Please address how much of this new debt incurred was from the fraud and theft from the unemployment trust fund by felons who were scamming this system?
How much?
I own a business and both myself and my wife and one employee were hit.
This caused us undo grief and hassle to deal with but the big question here is what did our state lose in real money?
Did we just run up the debt to pay these felons who stole from us?
Surely this 4.4 billion isn’t all from real actual legal claims of unemployment is it?
One has to be a BS artist in the land of BS and Andy Manar has mastered the art.
I’ve mentioned this before, I left CPS in my late 40’s and I took a small pension from CPS at 55. At age 60, it began compounding at 3% for cost of living. It is now worth 55% more than its beginning yearly value and I’ve collected over 8 times more than I deposited. It’s obscene but there are many who have worked 2 or 3 public sector jobs and have 2 or 3 checks mailed monthly. The sad part is when I was asked in my follow-up sales career, what did yo do before you opened this shop?” I… Read more »
Just look at Edgar for the best example of abuse, and probably fraud, with public pensions.
really tired of platitudes (aka bs) from Illinois/Chicago politicians….no more “midwest nice”….we need to organize and push back…..just like the public unions and ….the lawyers, and the other players that make Illinois the #1 (or maybe #2) most corrupt state in the country
Shocking individual.
Complete political hack.
God Help Us.
In the comments below I saw someone made a comment about Manar being a coward.
Well Andy based upon the post votes here I think you are well aware of this posting platform
So hey Andy; prove to us you are not a coward by facing the voters in your district again? It’s your opportunity to prove that you are not a coward.
Well Andy?????
Hi,this is Andy,and all i care about is getting an exhorbinant pension like the rest of my fat colleagues
Mark: GR8 Rebuttal to this hack, Manar!
He’s clearly a paid cheerleader for a team that’s NEVER won a game. In this case the team is Democrats, and the “game” is ENABLING CITIZENS NOT IN GOVT TO BECOME PROSPEROUS
Andy doesn’t have a district anymore. He quit the state senate to collect two paychecks working for JB directly.
Hi,im Andy Manure,and i do ANYTHING JB tells me too,cuz im a weak feckless douchebag
You know you’re gaining clout when they start to swing at you publicly.
Mark-I brought this up before. You need to have both the positive and negative votes up at the same time. In any comment there can be 10 agree votes but if ten votes are negative or disagree it would show as zero (0) so 20 people made comments but it shows as there were no comments made. In any article there are always various opinions but equal amounts on both sides cancel each other out. Plus an edit (by the commentator) feature would help in case of an error or misspelling.
I agree – Freddy’s suggestion would create a better indicator of reader involvement and opinion.
No easy way to do that with our software when we last looked, but we will try again.
Thank You for trying. Maybe we could find a 3 or 4 year old to upgrade the software. LOL! To them it’s a 5 minute job to me a lifetime. I can’t recall how many times someone real young helps me with my phone or electronic device.
I’ve been able edit my comments before. I think you can only do it for a short time. Hover your mouse to the side of your comment and an edit button will appear.
Looks like the inmates have escaped the CrapFax playpen today. Did Silly Willy finally leave mom’s basement?
Looks like your post, among others, has been oswegoed. It is rather interesting that the word Oswego is derived from the Iroquoian Indian word osh-we-ge that meaans “pouring out” because it fits so well. If there was any pouring out of capitalized crap one might simeply say instead Oswego (capital) crap is involved in the ratings here today. So juvenile but what would one expect to happen when a discussion revolves around an Illinois politician that takes a job to feather his pension bed and at the same time not have to face the voters next election. It is the… Read more »
Plenty of downvotes here today. One might head over to Bunker Hill though and ask anyone what they think of Andy and you will probably hear negative things directed towards him. Naturally there is always a low voter turnout in his area but just the same there is always the usual negativity and ater hearing so much of it I wondered if his new State job was not only to spike his pension but also to protect him from the voters.
Just noticed this clowns last name is similar to ” manure”-lol-coincidence?
This guy Manar is pure scum and a coward!
Looks like Illinois Democrats and their minions have added soft and thin skinned to ignorant and corrupt. Go pound sand.
Ohh boy the aerial artillery is firing a lot of flak, wirepoints must be over the target!
I thought all the leftist “know it all” hypocrites didn’t know what Wirepoints was? Why are they even bothering to spend their time with the downvotes?
And let’s not forget the main point of the narrative that everything is fine in Illinois. Duh – what have I been thinking? Mandates, crime, high cost of living, residents fleeing the state. I must be imagining it all.
What would Rauner’s term have been like had the 5% income tax been made permanent in 2011 instead of expiring in 2015 when Rauner took office? Contentious still, no doubt, but he had $20 billion less revenue to manage over his term because a Democrat-controlled GA didn’t have the guts to make the tax hike permanent in 2011. Rauner had to manage state finances based on a tax rate the blue GA themselves promised would be adequate in 2015. IT WAS THEIR TAX RATE! Granted, Manar wasn’t around for that vote, but many of those still in office today were.… Read more »
Edit above: $13B less revenue, not $20B
I will add that while the new revenue streams under the JB administration from things like marijuana are nice, they are a tiny fraction to what raising the state income tax rate back to 5% generated. They are not budget changers by any means. And I bet you could’ve twisted Rauner’s arm to increase the gas tax, but I doubt it would have doubled. Again, the only financial differentiator is a consistent flat 5% income tax. Well, that, and a rubber-stamping GA.
proof that these left wing democrat dolts occasionally read wirepoints is all the downvotes,hilarious
I’m open to hearing counter-arguments. Downvotes are just lazy.
they have no counter arguments-“we ll show wirepoints by downvoting the comments”-thatll teach em!!-nanny nanny boo boo
They can read, and judging by all the downvotes they know the difference between + and -. They don’t understand math though.
They read Wirepoints but do they actually look at the data? They govern by telling people what they want to hear and not by facts. What they’ve done to the finances of the state is criminal. Instead of confronting the matter head on, like responsible adults, they take the way way out and lie and tell the people everything is fine meanwhile, they nickel and dime us to death.
For sure Rob!
Wouldn’t it be great that every politician in Illinois would be required to be hooked up to a lie detector when they speak? The needle on the machine would would vibrate so much that the paper would catch fire. They lie so much that they are starting to believe in what they say.
lmfao!!
Nothing seems to really change in Illinois – Same old song, just different verse.
What’s most egregious is that Illinois simply pretended in its budgeting that the unemployment fund problem does not exist. The federal loan and the rest of the unemployment fund’s deficit are ignored in both the current budget and the five-year budget projection recently published by the Pritzker Administration. But the entire hole will have to be filled, either by higher taxes on employers, lower unemployment benefits or cash from other state sources. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is clear what these people are doing. They intend to saddle all of the unconnected businesses in the state (regardless… Read more »
They’re hoping Biden will forget about the unemployment money. He night, but he has staff who haven’t lost their marbles yet; they will be around to collect.
Wow, kudos to you Wirepoints. With the response Pritzkers office just offered and it is clear they read this site, it just shows that you are over the target. If they are using ad hominem attacks against you, you should wear it as a badge of honor. They can’t ever debate on the merits. To Pritzkers cronies who read this site and message board: you are the definition of hubris and irresponsibility. You have left this state far worse off then when you came in. Shame on you. The decent hard working people of this state will never recover from… Read more »
The downvoting is only proving my point further. Hey Pritzker flunkies, $110,000 in pension debt per household and that number is compounding faster than S&P500. Congratulations for creating an entire generation of debt slaves to pension holders. Shameful.
The downvotes come in blocks, probably when an article gets circulated somewhere in the regime. Andy they never have any substantive comment to make.
You are truly too kind to them. Where are the torches, pitchforks, tar and feathers when you really need them? I know, supply chain problems.
He has a degree in history and education, not accounting, not math, not engineering or any field that requires accuracy and objectivity. Hell history can be anything you choose to write down. So numbers don’t matter to him, thats why he was hired, to push the agenda regardless of what the facts are. For reasons like this the “pandemic” will never end, the left absolutely needs the pandemic and it needs a constant supply of variants. Having a pandemic allows them to beat disbelievers into submission and to spend, borrow or print money endlessly in the name of some great… Read more »
The pandemic is beginning to resemble the constant war with Eurasia and/or East Asia. Manar is apparently running the Ministry of Truth these days.
Did someone from the Capitolfax comments section write Manar’s responses? I mean, if we’re going ad hominem here, isn’t Andy technically an employee of Pritzker’s East Jackson Street corporation? He’s on their payroll, no? Either way, Andy comes across like the oil company PR guy touting the environmental benefits of its most recent oil spill.
Wirepoints,
Is there any possible way to have this article or some form of it available to all the people in Illinois other than here at your site. Somehow some way the people of Illinois need to know the real truth behind Pritzker and the politicians of Illinois, to me it seems most are blind to the real facts as to what is really happening.
All of our articles are free for republication by other media outlets subject only to giving appropriate attribution, so your question really has to go to those other outlets.
Thanks
Tell EVERYONE you know about Wirepoints and get them to subscribe and support. It’s one site on my e-mail that I never miss.
The guy is nothing more than a Pritzker pawn. His “explanations” are worthless and weak, like the man himself. Take a seat Andy, until puppeteer Pritzker tells you to dance again. What a pathetic excuse for a career.
Only an extreme reprobate could provide the responses that Manar did. Unfortunately, us Illinoisans and particularly our kids, if they choose to stay, will bear the consequences of having a man with such little intelligence and honesty in an elevated position in the state.
Hey, you’re insulting Gov. Toilets’ Minister of Truth. Be careful what you say about him or you may find yourself the subject of a Two Minutes Hate. Or Toilets may sit on you-literally.
He’s a lying democrap and is there anything unusual about that? Fat Boy Jelly Belly will probably hang his solid fake gold Weight Watchers Loser medal around his neck and five him an “Atta boy” for toeing the propaganda line.
Manar, just another politician that got appointed to a cushy state job that will spike his pension. Nothing new here…just typical Illinois politician/robber.
Well imagine that,another politician that lies and exaggerates,hes nothing more than a Pritzker ” mini me”-” Get in ma belly” says JB
Nothing boosts Wirepoints’s credibility like this lame shill.