46th District Candidates: Is Bankruptcy an Option for Illinois
By: Blake Long
Updated: October 9, 2012
In the race for the 46th State Senate seat, Republican Pat Sullivan is facing Democrat Incumbent Dave Koehler. Our Question: Since reports show the state of Illinois is in the worst shape financially than any other state, we're asking the candidates if bankruptcy is an option?
Pat Sullivan:
" We've raised our taxes, we've borrowed too much, we've spent too much. We gotta stay within our budgets and our means and we're not doing that. We have to get some jobs, we've lost over 200,000 jobs in the last handful of years. The direction the leaders have taken us isn't working and we've got to change that. We got to these taxes off our workers back and off these businesses backs because if the business is paying taxes to the government, they're not expanding. I'm a businessman, I know about this."
Dave Koehler:
"No. No, we cannot go bankrupt and we don't need to, we have made some progress. It's slow, but we didn't get there in one year. This is a matter of decades and decades of really not mismanagement, but doing things that didn't quite make sense in the bottom line. So, with doing things like when we started missing pension payments way back, ya know, 30 years ago someday we knew that that would catch up to us and now it has, but bankruptcy is not an option for the state of Illinois."
Pat Sullivan:
" We've raised our taxes, we've borrowed too much, we've spent too much. We gotta stay within our budgets and our means and we're not doing that. We have to get some jobs, we've lost over 200,000 jobs in the last handful of years. The direction the leaders have taken us isn't working and we've got to change that. We got to these taxes off our workers back and off these businesses backs because if the business is paying taxes to the government, they're not expanding. I'm a businessman, I know about this."
Dave Koehler:
"No. No, we cannot go bankrupt and we don't need to, we have made some progress. It's slow, but we didn't get there in one year. This is a matter of decades and decades of really not mismanagement, but doing things that didn't quite make sense in the bottom line. So, with doing things like when we started missing pension payments way back, ya know, 30 years ago someday we knew that that would catch up to us and now it has, but bankruptcy is not an option for the state of Illinois."
