The public workers of Illinois are stealing.
They signed up to do a job starting at minimal pay in order to have a decent retirement. I don’t think that is stealing. Is it stealing when the company gives you 3 percent towards your 401K for free? Is it stealing by the military who works only 20 years and gets a healthy pension for the rest of their lives with COLAS every year too?
It’s stealing because almost all of the Illinois workers who now are now retiring, started working for a very different deal. That deal changed in the late 1990’s in exchange for votes. And the pensions were retroactively sweetened. Nobody now retiring thought they would get anywhere near the payout they have now.
Illinois workers get a far sweeter pension than most government workers in most states. It is stealing. Its just that there are so many people who get some form of this pension that they can always vote to keep the payments coming. And the Illinois Supreme court won’t let the pensions change. So Illinois is mathematically destine to become Detroit. Its sad. But its impossible to change it. Math is math. And making $10,000 millionaires a year can not be paid for with taxes.