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Yeah it’s a horrible mess. One generation promised itself the next generation will pay them massive, undeserved pensions. That first generation is still calling the shots (and voting avidly) and the coming generation is going to be stuck with an impossible tab, continuously rising taxes, lowered pensions and benefits, and a miserable situation all around.

Or Illinois could find a way to renege without filing for bankruptcy to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Perhaps someday Madigan and his political machine will pay for what they’ve done. But likely not.

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Illinois is unique, though.

The thing is: part of a person's paycheck goes into a fund that is supposed to support their pension. So they're not really passing the buck to the next generation, the money they contribute is supposed to be there for them when they retire.

The PROBLEM is that corrupt politicians in the 90s used the pension money and basically lost all of it. So we're in a situation where the money that should have been sitting around for people with pensions to draw from is GONE, and all we can do is scoop and throw until a miracle happens.

edit: I shouldn't editorialize and say "corrupt politicians", please mentally replace that phrase with "The money was badly mishandled"

Even if the money was there, all the projections when they created the pension benefits assumed unrealistic rates of return.

>, all the projections when they created the pension benefits assumed unrealistic rates of return.

It would be interesting if ComputerGuru's post was "politicians promised mathematically impossible pensions" instead of "undeserved pensions".

Maybe the replies would have focused on that aspect. The issue is that the unrealistic pensions were promised by politicians instead of competent actuaries. With promises like automatic 3% annual pension increases, they've created an exploding liability that even Norway and Sweden couldn't fulfill. Illinois created promises that exceeded the productive capacity of its citizens' tax base.

Would that be the difference between "something possibly reasonable" and "what we have now" coming from the pension fund?

Did you read the report? The problem is that PROMISED pension benefits have grown, there's no funding problem if the amount of promised benefits grew with the economy or with revenue.

Defining the benefit and failing to fund it is literally passing the buck.

Doesn't matter if the failure is intentional, luck, whatever.

The PROBLEM is that corrupt politicians in the 90s

And how did those corrupt politicians get into office and stay in office?

corruption

You raise a valid point, I shouldn't editorialize in this context.

I don't KNOW if it was corrupt politicians. Better to say: "The money was badly mishandled"

Except the whole point of the article is that even if the State had put in the money it was supposed to, that wouldn't have kept up with the promises.

And also, you're whitewashing the role of public employees. Those "corrupt politicians" are Democrats who keep getting elected with the support of teachers', police, etc., unions. Chicago's pension holidays, for example, resulted in that money going to CPS directly, to support higher salaries and the "pension pickup" (where the school district covered most of teachers' required pension contributions).

You're absolutely correct here, saying "corrupt politicians" was lazy and means nothing.

Additionally, I agree there were failures at many levels regarding the promises made to the people of Illinois.

Honestly, I don't completely absolve the citizens of Illinois ( Of which I am one ). As the article states, these pension numbers NEVER added up and for some reason people kept buying into the "free golden ponies" narrative.

"The PROBLEM is that corrupt politicians ... lost it all"

That's hardly unique. It's the expected result when you let the government hold on to money for the future, rather than a bank.

Banks are bound by laws designed to prevent these kind of problems. Governments are not.

I could be wrong but I thought California has the same mess, but most likely more massive.

http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-wor...

Satoshi? Is that you?

nope :( unlike him I haven’t built anything that’s had a big impact... yet

They deserve some of their pensions. Whatever they funded themselves plus a reasonable rate of riskfree return. But they are promised a lot more than a reasonable rate of return.

> part of a person's paycheck goes into a fund that is supposed to support their pension.

Yes. In Illinois, that portion is supposed to cover on the order of 10% of their pension, and taxes are (presumably) supposed to cover the other 90%. This figure is including market returns from initial contributions.

Bad mishandling may have made the situation worse, but, even if it had been handled perfectly, it still would have been unworkable.

One generation promised itself the next generation will pay them massive, undeserved pensions

Defined-benefit pensions are a form of deferred compensation. State employees in the past accepted lower salaries in exchange for this future benefit. Taking away that pension now would be theft from these people.

Using a similar argument, paying yourself exorbitant over-market compensation while cooking the books to avoid accounting for the true (and unaffordable) cost to your funders and auditors (the public, for Gov't) is a form of embezzlement.

I think the truth lies somewhere between here, but the obligations probably can't reasonably be met, and probably never could.

Those workers didn’t decide their own pay and benefits. And frankly they aren’t ridiculous. They are very reasonable and frankly a joke compared to the compensation of executives and bankers who bribe politicians to undermine and kill worker benefits.

Wealth inequality is certainly an issue, but it's not relevant to the issue being discussed. That there exists private sector executives whose salaries and benefits have more commas than most people can hope to make isn't relevant to pensions of an average worker.

> paying yourself exorbitant over-market compensation

It would be super-cool if the report was about this, but it's not. There's not a shred of evidence given that the compensation given to state workers was over-market.

I don't know about over-market, but it certainly feels high in real terms. Divide the total pension liability by the number of households in the state, and you get something approaching $150,000 per household, or about 2.5x the state's median household income. That's a pretty big burden of debt to have sitting on the shoulders of every resident of the state.

We've also got some pretty egregious cases to consider, which suggest that there aren't any guard rails around the pension system. The highest-paid pensioner in the state was able to retire at 55, and receives more than half a million annually. Plus the state's better-than-inflation 3% COLA.

Back when I was a kid, public sector jobs were known to pay less than private sector jobs, but offer stability and a pension.

They're also one of the few sectors of our working economy readily represented by unions.

My take on this is not that the public sector somehow struck it rich, but that the rest of us--those of us in the private sector--have had the screws put to us for a long long time, and that's why the public sector now looks fat and happy.

They didn't strike it rich, we struck it poor.

I'm not even sure about that. This is all anecdotal, but, the going rate for public jobs in my city is still quite low, and this does seem to have an impact on the quality of candidates they receive.

Since they can't attract candidates as effectively (frankly, that nice pension plan isn't nearly enough to make up for the crummy salary relative to what I can earn elsewhere), they aren't getting as many opportunities to hire really ambitious people. This has repercussions that play out in all sorts of ways, but, being a tech guy, the one I am most aware of is that acquaintances complain that the city often relies overmuch on low-tech and highly manual procedures for accomplishing basic tasks, because nobody is really motivated to streamline them. That results in lower per-employee productivity, which, in turn, increases the headcount requirements. Which, I'm guessing, increases overall labor costs relative to what they could be otherwise.

So it's not that the state's salary and pension costs are high because employees are well-compensated, it's actually something of the opposite.

Not true. Public sector salaries in places like Illinois are vastly higher than in other countries. Compare Illinois teacher and police salaries to the U.K. for an eye-opening surprise.

You're saying that when I was a kid, some 30 or 40 years ago, public sector employees were paid better than private sector employees?

I don't know about that, but check out the salaries at my kid's high school:

http://www.oprfhs.org/human-resources/documents/Over75KRepor...

At 50 names a page, you're on the bottom of the third page before you see the first person who isn't taking home six figures in base pay plus cash extra pay, before factoring in benefits.

These teachers are all part of the TRS pension plan and get lifetime pension at retirement. That's the jewel of the benefits package, but the rest of their benefits are pretty fucking excellent, too: cheap health insurance, huge numbers of vacation days.

Say what you will about the importance of teaching (and the fact that these comp numbers are perceived to flow right back into property values), these are not standard deals in the private market. They are, from the day you start your job to the day you retire, superior to the deal most private sector workers get.

They also get tenure (even in grade school). That sort of job security is worth a lot.

And they get 2 months of summer off.

Those aren't salary, but they are benefits that should be considered.

> Say what you will about the importance of teaching

Just curious, how does the teaching compare with other schools in other states. I've been saying for a while that teachers should have high salaries like that because for one it matches the rhetoric of "think of the children" / "children first", and that teaching should be a prestigious job in line with engineer, finance, doctor or lawyer. So here is a case were salaries seem to be in the ballpark of being "prestigious" would you say the quality of teaching and the environment in school is correspondingly better?

It's a good school, but it's inferior to the Jesuit college prep high school I went to (except for the facilities, which are far better) where the teachers made much less.

The wise course would be for every working-age adult and operating business to avoid domiciling within the state of Illinois. It is already bankrupt, and it may take some time before everyone involved is willing to admit to it. I'm certainly not going to volunteer as tribute.

The big problem here is that we are expecting people to be bound to promises made by their predecessors, without ever being a party to those original negotiations. When one generation promises itself lavish benefits, to be paid for by future generations, they shouldn't be surprised when those future generations tell them to go pound sand. One of the big problems with the US model of government is that it never erected any enforceable barriers to kicking a can down the road long enough for it to become someone else's problem. It's just so easy to outvote the opposition, when they haven't been born yet.

So now we have this generational warfare, where the grandparents' generation took out loans, had a big party of borrowed prosperity, and then structured the payoffs to happen after they were all dead. Then the parents' generation decided they could only afford to have 2 kids instead of 3, and immigrants were no longer welcome, because jobs. Then that dead, skeletal hand finally reaches across the years to give young people a giant, bony middle finger, and then pick their nearly-empty pockets.

If those kids think school shootings are a threat to their lives, just wait until they graduate, and 80% of everything they earn is actually going toward helping the grandmas and grandpas pay for their little blue pills while breeding antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea in their luxury retirement communities. They'll want those guns back, when they're out nationalizing the assets of retirees, and herding them into assisted-living ghettos, chewing through property portfolios in order from eldest to youngest. That's what springs to mind whenever I think about Illinois's pension problem: "Screw you, you entitled assholes; you're going to get what's coming to you, and it isn't money."

I think the paren't side of the argument also holds water, though: Paying these absurd pensions is something like a form of theft from future taxpayers. Most of the people who will have to pay for these pensions wouldn't have been of voting age when a lot of the deals were being made, so they really had zero say in the matter.

I doubt that state employees from previous generations realized that they were agreeing to skim all this money money off of their children and grandchildren, but, nonetheless, here we are. It's a situation where it's going to be impossible to do justice to everyone. But it's going to be important to minimize the injustice. That is probably going to require some concessions on the parts of pensioners - if they don't take a scale back, it's just going to put Illinois on a downward spiral as its most economically productive citizens and businesses emigrate. That's a worse path. It will lead to pensioners suffering an even worse kick in the pocketbook, and create a lot of collateral damage for working people in the process.

They’re not absurd pensions. They’re nothing compared to what many, many executives even of failing companies get paid.

Ok, but I, the tax payer, am not footing that bill (yes, I'm sure we can find instances of bailouts and whatnot, but that's not the norm.) Private companies can do whatever they like in this regard, I don't really care at a practical level. I care when I'm paying the bill.

This. I am ok with the state paving roads. I am not ok in the state paving roads in gold brick. I am ok with the state buying cop cars and work trucks. I am not ok with the state subsidizing top of the line pursuit models for departments that don't have highway to patrol and spec'ing out top trim trucks for the DOT.

The same goes for employee benefits. Something is ok. Luxury is not.

If there is a reasonably comparison between employee pensions and private industry "executive compensation" should be a massive red flag. Being a civil servant should not be about the money.

Yes, but in many private companies you are paying the bill as well. Anyone that does work for the government you are paying for, whether it be food service for government employees, insurance for government employees, etc. Also, any time you buy just about anything from a corporation you are facilitating this with your money as a portion of what you are paying for is going to pay those executives.

Its just that pensions are more direct and easy to see.

I usually have a choice if I want to buy something from a private company. I rarely need to give them my money, and if I do, I may have a choice, and even if I don't have a choice, it doesn't really affect me how they use my profits. You have no option in this manner when it comes to government workers, except perhaps moving out of state.

Your argument really looks like whataboutism. It's not because some people gets paid too much that it doesn't make the pensions absurd. Those facts do not have much in common.

You really think using exec compensation is a good point to compare to?

These pensions are just as absurd as executives of failing companies getting paid golden parachutes. That's the point the OP is making.

> Taking away that pension now would be theft from these people

There are four solutions to this problem: austerity (cutting spending and/or raising taxes), default (cutting benefits), borrowing and federal bail-out. At this point, the first postpones the second if borrowing or a bail-out aren’t options. (Borrowing explicitly postpones it.)

Note that “default” doesn’t mean unilateral cutting. It is politically negotiated, and may involve the state giving pensioners something in exchange for reduced cash benefits.

Cutting spending and raising taxes are not both indistinguishable forms of “austerity”. In the U.S. political context, the former almost always means cutting essential services to the most precarious people in society and the burden of the latter is almost always born by those with the most resources to bear it.

Attempting to elide the two together under one term fundamentally misrepresents the politics of the situation and makes two very different options sound equally unpalatable.

In Illinois, several recent taxes have been sales tax increases which are effectively regressive. Also a our state income tax is a flat percentage, and a temporary tax reduction expired so that increase is also hitting lower income residents at the same time that services are being cut.

They also accepted lower tax rates by letting the government use their pension funds rather then raising taxes. Why should I pay higher taxes to fund their low tax era?

The 'they' who accepted lower taxes is rich businesspeople etc., the 'they' who will lose their retirement is career schoolteachers etc.

And even today we continue to overspend with reduced tax rates.

Somebody has to take the punch bowl away and make us pay what’s come due.

Somebody has to take the punch bowl away and make us pay what’s come due.

Why is it public-sector retirees in particular who must pay that price? Again, they have moral and legal claims on their pensions, and they (largely low and moderate income households) are not the primary beneficiaries of decades of low taxes that left state pensions underfunded.

> Why is it public-sector retirees in particular who must pay that price?

Because they have voted in the politicians who perpetrated the fraud, and gladly bought into it. Public sector unions are one of the largest political donors.

Public sector retirees are not the only people who voted for these politicians.

Not only, but they can't claim this is something that was done to them over their protest. It was something done by them, in collusion with others.

>State employees in the past accepted lower salaries in exchange for this future benefit.

Well that was not the case with California's 1999 pension reform, where pensions were retroactively increased by 50% overnight.[0]

That kind of money doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Many of these cases were transparent scams and the people involved knew it.

[0] http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/sd-calpers-menda...

"State employees in the past accepted lower salaries in exchange for this future benefit."

Isn't this the public sector equivalent of letting a startup pay you in equity? While it may have been characterized as more secure than personal investment, agreeing to this compensation scheme doesn't remove the burden of risk, particularly when the 'startup' offering to pay you later is state government.

While it may have been characterized as more secure than personal investment, agreeing to this compensation scheme doesn't remove the burden of risk

Owing a defined-benefit pension is a legal obligation to provide a future revenue stream. It's more like a bond than a stock, and debt generally has priority over equity.

Companies default on bonds all the time. That's one of the reasons bonds carry interest - partially to compensate the bondholder for the opportunity costs of not having the money spent on bond and partially to compensate for the risk of the default. Would you buy a bond from a company that is consistently increasing spending 6x their revenue? Would you do it if their plan for covering the difference is "we'll just take more money from you when we need to"?

And employees who took their government’s and their employer’s word (and contract) for it are somehow he ones to blame?

It’s no small thing to suggest that people should view the legal obligations of their governments with skepticism. That we should anticipate, and account for the risk of, government default in our employment plans.

Politicians who didn’t want to raise taxes (to increase pay, to attract workers) made promises of deferred compensation (which have to be higher to offset now vs. future). Voters bought it, -hook, line, and sinker-, and the entire state bought public services on credit.

I have a hard time pinning that on the guy doing largely unskilled work for the last 30 years of his life. He may be left holding the bag, but I’m not going to leave him with the blame.

> It’s no small thing to suggest that people should view the legal obligations of their governments with skepticism.

It is a huge thing which should always be on people's mind. Government is the only player on the market who literally owns the rules of the game and can bend or completely change them in their benefit. Which means every promise from them should be viewed with extreme suspicion, as they are both the ones promising it and the ones charged with enforcing the promise, which means it is much easier for them to renege on the promise.

> I have a hard time pinning that on the guy doing largely unskilled work for the last 30 years of his life.

Government employees are not "largely unskilled work", and they are surely not voting against the current setup, as far as I can see. If they did, we could talk about something that is done to them against their will. Right now they are major part of the fraud being perpetuated. They are not some passive victim of some nefarious force, they are active and willing participants of the scheme. Try to cut those benefits or switch them to defined contribution or make them contribute enough to cover the deficit - and see how vocal they'd get.

Doesn't matter if there is a "legal obligation" or not, if the state does not have money to pay then the money will not be paid.

If I take on a $1m debt through an LLC, pocket the $1m, and have the LLC default, courts will see through that.

The state has money. The government doesn’t.

No, it’s the equivalent of a megacorp withdrawing funds from your 401k to cover its own losses.

By the way, startups do have to give you your shares, they just might turn out worthless. Governments promised USD, and were the safest borrowers around for a long time.

> Defined-benefit pensions are a form of deferred compensation.

Defined benefit plans are at best a deferred time bomb and at worst a deferred time bomb with a short fuse.

> State employees in the past accepted lower salaries in exchange for this future benefit.

So? If they were that concerned about the future benefits they should have received a defined contribution plan that pours the money into an employee controlled sinking fund. Nothing stops the State from declaring bankruptcy and reneging on its end of this deal.

It may sound callous but if the alternative is raising taxes to the point that nobody is left in Illinois, is that really an alternative? Sometimes you have to amputate an arm to save the patient.

> Taking away that pension now would be theft from these people.

Agreeing to these outrageous pensions with no way to pay for them is theft from all current and future tax payers. This is a scamola run by politicians to buy votes from public sector unions and it needs to end.

Yes, bankruptcy is a well established option for people who have bought things they can’t pay for. Part of the deal is losing your own assets. Residents signed up for these debts; residents must have their own retirement savings and property seized to pay for them. You’ve established that there’s no problem seizing already-earned compensation when the going gets tough, so why not yours?

> Yes, bankruptcy is a well established option for people who have bought things they can’t pay for. Part of the deal is losing your own assets. Residents signed up for these debts; residents must have their own retirement savings and property seized to pay for them. You’ve established that there’s no problem seizing already-earned compensation when the going gets tough, so why not yours?

Residents didn't directly sign up for these debts. A series of corrupt Democrat politicians who used theses pensions to buy union votes are responsible. While I admit the thought of their personal assets being seized to pay off these obligations does make me smile, I also don't think that'd be legal.

Similarly, it's not the personal assets of the rest of the citizens of Illinois that would be at stake here. There may be an argument for the sale of public assets, owned by the State itself, to cover some part of this in a bankruptcy hearing but I'd imagine there is going to be significant legal challenges to that as well. The optics of literally selling our children's public inheritance to pay off these corrupt deals is not going to play well with the electorate.

The counterparty for these pensions is not the individual residents of the State. It's the State itself, and possibly a subordinate institution. Sinking funds for current employees of those institutions are fair game. Similarly, the rest of the country is not responsible for these debts either.

> Taking away that pension now would be theft from these people.

The trick here is there's nothing to "take away". These benefits exist only as promises - there's no funding for them. If I promise to you if you work for me for a decade I will give you a trillion dollars, and then turns out I don't actually have the trillion dollars, the theft - or, more precisely, the fraud - doesn't happen when the lack of the trillion dollars is revealed. It happened when I promised you the trillion dollars without having it. The theft from these people has already happened - that's what people fail to realize.

Likewise, I can try to sue you for the trillion dollars you promised me but again, it doesn't exist and I'll never get it. You can declare bankruptcy and I can try to ask the court for some restitution in an amount the court believes you can support. The court will not, however, force you to be my slave and give me all your earnings from labor. Life ain't fair. Those promised the pensions got screwed. It sucks, I'm sorry... life isn't fair.

In some cases that may be true - in Illinois it is the other way around.

Illinois has shown that it will willingly take from the people in order to pay current as well as deferred payments to government workers. Below is a link to an article and research that shows that Illinois was far above normal government pay.

From the article below, I quote, "Not only do state workers in Illinois make more than the private-sector workers who pay their salaries, the average pay for state workers in Illinois is out of step with their peers in the other 49 state."

ARTICLE: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/press-releases/state-governme...

RESEARCH PAPER: https://d2dv7hze646xr.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2016...

My best guess is that Illinois will default (in some manner) on these pensions. The next recession, combined with net population drop, will doom the state's finances beyond repair if they aren't already too far gone.

I'd also recommend looking through this to see how negligent their political leaders have been over the years:

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/search?q=illinois%20pension

Actually, they accepted above-market salaries with above-market pay raises and above-market retirement benefits. There was literally no sacrifice involved.

There are plenty of government unions that did bargain for lower salaries in exchange for higher retirement benefits, (for example, many teachers' unions did) but those unions won't be found in Illinois.

> State employees in the past accepted lower salaries in exchange for this future benefit.

Except it's not true. Teachers in Illinois, for example, earn about $65,000 on average. In the U.K., which has high teacher salaries compared to the OECD, is around 28,000 pounds (roughly $42,000 at typical exchange rates). https://www.independent.co.uk/news/youngest-and-the-best-pai.... Same is true for police, etc.

Comparing US to UK raw salaries introduces a lot of other variables. State employees in the US have traditionally accepted lower salaries than other similarly skilled workers in the US in exchange for benefits.

Workers who switch from teaching jobs to non-teaching jobs see their salaries typically go down. https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-comp....

Teachers only look relatively underpaid if you lump all college graduates together and look at average salaries. That number is heavily skewed, because many of our executives and professionals (bankers, doctors, lawyers, programmers) are paid multiples more than in Europe. That just means those people are paid too much, not that teachers are paid too little.

> Workers who switch from teaching jobs to non-teaching jobs see their salaries typically go down.

That's hardly shocking. My salary would go down if I switched from programming (which I've been doing for decades) to something else, too.

however the idea that government workers accepted lower pay is wrong in most cases and a simple tactic where if repeated enough people start to believe it.

let alone far too many of the pension systems allow workers to game the system and end up with more in retirement than in service. there are many systems where the last three years pay can be used as the basis for the pension and stacking overtime and hoarding vacation are common place means of spiking the returns.

that is the abuse that bankrupts systems. the lower end government worker gets the shaft while the higher up politicians and police and fire rake in 100k retirements.

Exactly! It's the aggregated selfishness and greed of many individuals that ruins it for all. "No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood."

That's a massive fraud. It's like I'd promise to hire somebody and pay him top salary, but the salary would be paid by the guy next door. And that guy is then stuck with a huge bill. He'd just refuse to pay, he didn't hire anybody and is not obliged to pay anything. But somehow sticking the bill to the guy next 25 years instead is completely normal.

Long story short, if you defer compensation you suffer a significant chance the other(larger) party will manage to screw you out of it.

The same is true if its a private or state entity. You either get money or assets in hand, or its effectively vapor. It also shows that working for the government may be stable, its certainly not good for pay.

It's called counterparty risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_risk#Counterparty_risk

Undeserved?

All parties agreed to a contract. They "deserved" it because that's what the contract said.

It's crummy that the state made promises it's now reneging on, but that in no way makes any sort of pension offer "undeserved."

This is a contract issue, not a moral one.

Or, think of a similar situation: the old guy who's fired shortly before retirement so that he doesn't qualify for his pension. The company says his performance was fine, but didn't want to pay a pension. Do we then conclude that his pension was "undeserved"? Of course not.

It was not a fair contract negotiated at arms length. The politicians who agreed to it were largely elected by public employee unions who disproportionally benefited from it at the expense of taxpayers. It was a huge conflict of interest and so there's nothing immoral about reneging on the contract now.

When you talk about generations, it is probably better to be more specific and talk about "generations of unionized workers". Police, teachers and few others. Not unionized workers have nothing to do with that.

> filing for bankruptcy

Illinois has significant assets and the power of taxation over a large economy. I can't see a court just allowing them to discharge their obligations. It's also not clear that states _can_ declare bankruptcy.

I think a federal bailout of some kind is more likely, not a better idea necessarily, but more likely.

> a federal bailout of some kind is more likely

At least in my D.C. circles, the Puerto Rico bail-out bill was framed as a dry run for Illinios.

I think we will see a federal bail out, plus benefit cuts, plus Illinois privatizing some government assets. I would bet Puetro Rico's pension recipients get their benefits cut also.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/puerto-rico-re...

We will all pay in the end though, via the reduced value of the US dollar. Just have to make sure we stay ahead of inflation, and try not to live in the jurisdictions with the worst finances, because they're quality of life will probably steadily erode.

This is a dishonest characterization. Those people put their work into those pensions. They deserve them as much as you deserve your paycheck. The problem is we keep electinng crooks and weasels who undermine services and programs so they are doomed and then say “Look these programs don’t work!!”

When it all hits the fan you can't talk about what people deserve (or at least ask what do the future generations of taxpayers deserve?), you have to talk about what is actually possible.

We need to talk about what is ethical. There's no difference between seizing pensions and simply seizing bank accounts or other property. The reason it's possible to seize pensions from state workers is because state workers are powerless. It's no more ethical than retroactively seizing their salaries.

Ok, so what's your solution? What approach is ethical in regards to the previous generation and the current? Someone has to pay the bill. Discussing what's "fair" or ethical is all well and good, but lacking context re what is _possible_ and _practical_ it's just an academic exercise.

Raise taxes on the rich. Raise taxes on the big businesses in Illinois--or, if they're anything like Oregon and Washington, stop giving them so many tax breaks.

That's one solution.

Raise taxes enough and rich people and big businesses will simply leave Illinois.

That doesn't really happen. Certainly it is a scare tactic that the rich have successfully employed to fool people with, but rich folks tend to stay put even more than poor people.

Here's one article of many, many you can find:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/do-taxes-really-cause...

The closing paragraph:

"Ultimately, the study finds that, while some millionaires do move to lower-tax destinations, the overall rate of millionaire migration is extremely low. When all is said and done, the super-rich tend to migrate less then the rest of us. The reason for this is simple—most people depend on the places they live for their incomes, since their businesses are based there. Indeed, this new study confirms an increasingly important fact of our economic geography: because some places generate a lot more wealth than others, the amount of money we make is largely tied to where we live."

Precisely. Why does Apple run an operation in Ireland instead of Illinois or California? It isn't the result of some sense of corporate generosity. It is pure fantasy to imagine capital will not flee the state when burdened with anticompetitive taxation.

They'll just leave, like they're already doing. Illinois already has net decreasing taxable revenue, driving out the wealthy tax payers just exacerbates the issue.

> state workers are powerless

You’ve never been to Illinois, have you?

State workers here run The Democratic Machine. They are effectively the willing soldiers of an organized crime syndicate, getting paid exorbitant sums to perform little work.

And they all get “promoted” just before their 25 years are up so they pull the maximum pension possible.

I would be inclined to believe you if this problem wasn’t pervasive. Pensions like these are built on promises and backed by tax payers. As a tax payer we have every right to oversee the situation and compel changes if we deem them necessary.

That's all well and good, so what's your solution? How do you fund these pensions without screwing over everyone else? What policy is fair to everyone else without screwing the previous generation?

In each of your comments you defend the pensioners, which is fine, but there's a limited pool of money. We live in the real world where you have to work within the confines of reality. Opining about how unfair it is to cut pensions doesn't solve anything or move the conversation forward. It's little more than whining.

If I convince the mayor of my small town to sign a document saying the town will pay me $100k for 100 years for my 'services' for the next 5 years, does no future generation have the right to renegotiate that?

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