State Senator Win Stoller (R-Germantown Hills) issued the following statement after House Democrats passed an ill-advised and incomplete plan to address the state’s multi-billion dollar unemployment insurance trust fund deficit:
“Paying off our state’s $4.5 billion unemployment trust fund deficit should have been the number one priority of Illinois legislators. Instead, Illinois Democrats have continually ignored the problem and now our state’s struggling businesses, who are still recovering from the pandemic, will be unfairly forced to bear the burden of fixing this problem. To fill the hole that was created, our employers will now be facing one of the largest tax increases in state history.”
“Illinois has received billions in federal relief funds designed to be used for COVID related impacts, like the unemployment trust fund. Our elected officials should have followed the same common-sense approach to this crisis that financially responsible states like Texas who used their ARPA money to completely replenish their $7.2 billion UI Trust Fund debt. Meanwhile, here in Illinois, Democrats chose to spend our federal dollars meant to help our economic recovery on pork projects. Pushing this burden onto our state’s employers when we could have easily solved it with federally gifted funds is yet another example of why Illinois is so often viewed as an anti-business, anti-jobs state.”