Why listen to Tear For Fears? He just repeats day old FR news.
Heard about this.
Illinois is circling the drain.
bmp
In Cyprus, the government simply took what it wanted from peoples’ savings accounts. This is no different, except that the owners are forced to write a check.
The property tax is incremental confiscation of your property. After 30 years they have forced you to give them the entire value of your property.
Rather than fixing the pension problem by putting new people on 401K or similar, the idea is to steal a little bit from the property “rich” (or a lot from the really property “rich”) to buy the votes of the government employees (including lots of teachers). They figure that if you spread the pain over 30 years, people will stop noticing it. However, what really will happen is that Madigan & Co. will siphon off the funds for their graft and corruption.
While the Illinois Dem leadership is to a large extent, responsible for not funding the retirement systems, some, if not all, school districts jack up the pay of retiring administrators for their last year or so to increase their retirement payment. This payment is dumped on the state.
Apparently Illinois had a history of robbing promised pensions and when they wrote a new constitution in the 70s or so they put in a clause that these promises could not be changed. Since then, pensions have become quite good and most teachers seem to be retiring around 55 and seem to live quite well.
The tax burden will immediately be reflected in lowered property values.