Now, to pay off its retirement debt, Illinois needs more than $6 billion a year from taxpayers to make up for the skipped contributions to the pension system, along with more than $1 billion more to pay off its pension bonds. That represents more than one-fifth of the state’s general-fund budget. By contrast, states typically spend no more than 4 percent to 5 percent of their budgets on pensions.There are about 12.88 million people living in Illinois currently. If the extra $7 billion were divided equally among all of these citizens, it would mean everyone has to cough up an extra $543.47 a year. Not everyone will do so, of course. Will "the rich" be able to pick up the freight? Or will they pull up stakes instead? Place your bets.
Monday, May 11, 2015
Good luck with that
So the State of Illinois doesn't have the money to pay off its pension obligations, you say? And you'd like to make changes so that it's possible to reform the system so that it doesn't bankrupt everyone in the state? Forget about it, says the state supreme court:
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1 comment:
This is why you listen to the **** actuaries when they say what the long term costs are.
At this point, the Illinois resident (many of my relatives qualify) has no choice but to go for a constitutional amendment allowing the state to default (but wouldn't that be ex post facto? Hmmmm?), or a national law allowing states to go bankrupt.
Now if you allow a state to go bankrupt, does that put a portion of those state pensions on the federal bill? That's what the steel company bankruptcies of the 1990s did, and that's what would have happened if the Feds hadn't bailed out GM and Chrysler.
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