Hi, this is Senator ██████████ asking you to join our live telephone town hall meeting. Just stay on the line to be automatically connected. You'll have an opportunity to ask questions, vote in surveys on your phone or just listen in. We'll be discussing important issues facing our community based on questions from the live Tele Townhall audience. Again, please stay on the line to be connected to our forum now in progress. My office can be reached at ████████████. Thank you. You are joining a live conference already in progress. Please be aware that your local phone company may leave your line open for up to ██ seconds after you leave the conference. If you would like to ask the speaker a question, please press 0. We already have some great questions coming in and looks like the first one is from ██████ in ████████ and she's wanting me to read her question. She's asking A lot of people are hearing about the state budget being tighter this year. How challenging is this year's budget compared to recent years and what are the biggest things lawmakers are trying to balance right now? Thanks for the question, ██████. And you're exactly right. It's going to be a tough year. I wake up almost every morning and I wonder if a tweet from the White House is going to blow an additional billion dollar hole in our budget. It's a really scary time with the changes coming out of Washington. Some of the media outlets here in ████████ have added up all the imposed or threatened budget cuts from ████ and at the moment it totals more than $██ billion over the next ██ years. Most of them are targeting health care, disability care, food assistance programs, transportation. It's unsettling. Now, a lot of this is being successfully challenged in court by our attorney general. And we've got a strong economy in ████████ that's going to give us the chance to backfill some of the these cuts. But no state in the country can make up for the devastating cuts that are coming. So it's going to hurt red states as much as blue states. I'm hoping that this Congress or perhaps a new Congress will recognize how irresponsible this is and reassert its authority. In the meantime, we're doing the best we can and we're going to pass the most responsible balanced budget we can with the facts we know at the time. So thanks for the question. Absolutely. ██████, thanks for joining our forum here tonight. And again, if you've joined a little late on the line, you are here right now with your state senator, ██████████. He's here to open the floor, answer questions that you might have on topics that are most important to you. So again, if you'd like to get in line to ask a question at any time, please press 0 on your phone keypad. Let's get to our next question from ████ in ███████████. Who's asking? I've heard you and the governor talk about Illinois getting several critics rating upgrades in recent years. What does that actually mean for taxpayers? Great question, ████. Credit ratings for the state are a little like credit ratings for we as individuals. It means two things for us. It means something financially and it means something symbolically financially. It means that the state gets better interest rates when we need to borrow money, issue bonds for things like road projects. And that in turn saves you money, saves taxpayers money. Maybe as important is the symbolic value of the credit upgrades. The ██ upgrades we've received in recent years send a message that we've turned our finances around. The chaos in ████████ has been replaced with stability, and we're making wise short and long term decisions that financial stability is important to attract businesses. I was just this week at an event in ████████ county where a global medicine manufacturer announced a $███ billion expansion in ████████.