Let me bring you up to date on the soap opera that is Chicago. The City of Chicago had cobbled together a pension reform plan that included requiring city workers to chip in more for their own retirements, raised the retirement age, and trimmed cost of living adjustments. The other day the Illinois Supreme Court struck down that plan as I’ve been saying all along it would. Illinois’s constitution makes public employees’ pension plans legally enforceable rights that cannot be diminished. Let me say that again: if your plan diminishes public employees’ pensions, it will be struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal put in their two cents:
The ruling further limits Mr. Emanuel’s fiscal options as pension payments take an ever-growing share of city revenues. On Thursday the gracious souls at the Chicago Teachers Union announced a one-day walkout on April 1. The CTU isn’t allowed to strike until this summer, but CTU president Karen Lewis told her members not to worry: “What are they going to do, arrest us all? Put us all in jail? There’s not 27,000 spaces in the Cook County Jail right now.†Ah, she cares so deeply for the children.
The ruling may be better news for Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner, who has been trying to reform the state pensions amid a hostile Democratic legislature. The court said in its Chicago ruling that a reform would be constitutional if workers had a choice to go into a modified or lower-benefit structure.
Meanwhile, the city has just borrowed another $220 million to meet its pension payment obligations. I wonder how the city will manage to pay the interest on that loan let alone the principle.
Is it my imagination or is the city’s race to bankruptcy accelerating?
What a nightmare.
Magical thinking, that’s the fiscal background of so many social progressive’s as they attempt to mold policies, and wring more revenues out of limping local, state and federal economies.
I read this morning that California, where all things fiscal are rosy, has a pension $100b underfunded, and Calpers is demanding that it’s fund managers put global warming “experts” on portco boards.
Savvy fiscal stewardship.
The policies here weren’t molded by “social progressives” at least not by progressives as they’d be recognized in New York or San Francisco. They were created by plain old Chicago machine politicians.
Drew,
Jerry Brown, our “savvy” Governor Moon Beam , has put a nice glaze on our state economy, by juggling this and that. However, it’s only a topping, nothing more. Eventually the real flavor of California’s non business friendly, top heavy democratically-run government, coupled by those underfunded liabilities, will bubble up, spoiling the image projected here.
Dave, I view social progressives and machine politicians as being fueled by similar motivations —-> self-serving power houses, rather than empowering the people they are supposedly serving.
No, I think those are really two distinct groups. Progressives are motivated by wanting to effect their ideas of the tide of history (construed as “doing good”) and the satisfaction they derive from that. Machine politicians are motivated by gain, the desire for power for its own sake, and the desire to remain in office. By my standards Bernie Sanders is a progressive and Hillary Clinton is a machine politician.