Governor JB Pritzker declared last week when announcing the formation of the Behavioral Health Workforce Education Center that the state was building “the best behavioral health system in the nation.” It was quite a bold thing to say. So, my associate Isabel Miller and I asked a couple of follow-up questions: How long will this take and how much will it cost?

Last month, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek headline for my blog: “Poll conducted for IEA finds about 10 percent of Illinoisans are wackos.”

The political fallout from COVID mismanagement has also resulted in politiopaths wishing to offload the responsibilities for health emergencies to the World Health Organization (WHO) in an all-too-familiar cowardly dodge, not unlike our Ukraine engagement (and many more conflicts before it) with no congressional “Declaration of War” as dictated in the U.S. Constitution.

After taking a pandemic-induced hiatus from proposing large, permanent base spending-increases and instead using most revenue increases for one-time expenditures, Governor JB Pritzker’s recently-proposed Fiscal Year 2024 state budget appears to increase base operational-spending by at least $2.75 billion, or 7.9 percent. Annual pension payments will also rise by a relatively modest $201 million, which ups the total base spending-increase to $2.95 billion.