Posted on 06/10/2017 1:36:34 PM PDT by Wolfie
Illinois is Collapsing: It's Coming Everywhere
The blame game is in full force, including in Crain's.
Like in a good Agatha Christie mystery, there's a whole train-full (or, in this instance, Capitol-full) of suspects in the case of Who Killed Illinois? Just like on the Orient Express, they're all guilty to one degree or another.
.... Here's who's at the top of my list: Gov. Bruce Rauner and House Speaker Michael Madigan, in that order. Other folks had their hands on the knife, but these two are the ones who really drove it in.
Uh huh.
Sure.
Maybe you can blame Madigan. He's been there long enough. But Rauner? C'mon folks.
It was obvious that Illinois was going to fail as a state before I left in 2000. That was 17 years ago by my count.
Why?
Impossible promises made to public unions, for one. And that's not a small one either. Suburban school districts that were driving property taxes through the roof (they're doubled since I left, incidentally, by my count) and then the general pension promises on top of that.
For those who continue to say "but it's a contractual obligation" or even "it's protected by the State Constitution" I reply thus: A contract to do an impossible thing is not a contract at all.
You cannot enforce a "contract" you make with me where I am to jump over the Empire State Building unassisted. Why? Because the act contemplated is impossible.
Similarly, a promise to pay an exponentially increasing amount where the exponent is larger than the tax base growth rate is also impossible. That's math, and it makes any such promise void.
The longer the people of Illinois fail to demand that all of the medical providers in the state who are and do conspire to drive up and fix prices, refuse to quote a price before a procedure is done and engage in other similar acts, all of which I remind you appear to be illegal on their face under 15 USC, face indictment and prosecution the further down the hole the state will go.
The longer the people of Illinois refuse to demand that all public pension promises that were made with knowledge that the "growth rates" promised and assumed exceeded the historical or any rationally-arguable future growth in the tax base be declared void due to fraud at the time of the agreement the further down the hole the state will go.
You can try to enforce payment of said pensions but you can't make blood run out of a stone. If there is no money, there is no money. If you don't pay the teachers, police and firefighters who are on the job now because you take all the cash and give it to the pensioners the current employees will not show up as nobody in their right mind works without being paid.
15 minutes later the entire Chicagoland area is overrun with gangs and burned to ash.
Go ahead folks, keep pretending. It won't work because it can't, but denial of mathematics is something that politicians are exceedingly good at. I left the state in no small part because I saw it coming, it was mathematically inevitable and utterly nobody would do anything but scream "but you made a contract" when I brought up the fact that at the time the promise was made the people negotiating it on both sides of the table knew full well that it was mathematically impossible for what they "negotiated" to happen.
Watch and learn, because this same dynamic is coming to the rest of the nation -- and in Washington DC, driven by Medicare and Medicaid where exactly the same dynamic, driven by the same medical scam, has been unfolding for the last 30 years.
This could have been written about CT as well.
obamaland another legacy of the failure of this nimrod and the rats who control the cities
nothing changes till the money runs out...................
Big government does have its downsides.
It’s not coming everywhere. Many States and cities have changed their pension plans and are not on the hook. The Federal Govt did this back in the 80s. I don’t know the exact numbers of States that have done this.
This was decades in the making not just the 8 years Obama was in office and both parties can be blamed.
California, nj, ny, and any other libtard stronghold,as well.
When Democrats negotiate public employee pension plans, the taxpayers are going to get a raw deal, just like John Kerry negotiating with Iran or negotiating the Paris climate accords.
Escape from Chicago, Snake Pliskin I thought you were dead.
Massholechusetts was just downgraded by S&P this week. The legislators just voted themselves a nice salary increase and are whining about a “fiscal crisis” while setting the groundwork for a progressive income tax.
That song “We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place” by the Animals is on the playlist of every taxpayer here.
“Go ahead folks, keep pretending.”
For many, many years I’ve said America has not failed yet due to two things:
1. We hold so much WEALTH (yes, and debt - but we have more wealth) that the Socialists haven’t, ‘run out of other people’s money’ yet and...
2. Too many of us are WILLING to take I.O.U.s from Mother Government in one form or another.
It may not happen in my lifetime, but it IS going to happen. I’m terrible at math, but THIS, ‘math’ I understand.
Haircuts all around but no money from Uncle Sam.
How long have the Left been in charge?
O’ Everett McKinley Dirksen tried for years to keep the lid on IL, but now 48 years after his passing, the truth is out! Compromise does not pay dividends for the long haul.
How about 10-year term limits for public employees with NO employer-funded retirement benefits (except military and certain positions where 10+ years experience serves some compelling public interest).
No one should make more than the average private sector worker by either picking up garbage or even teaching children for that matter. These should be jobs for people just out of high school or college who have not yet settled on some career choice in the private sector - so fine, then let the work for a few years on the public dole, then get out and make room for someone else.
There’s this mysterious correlation between spending and collapse; we haven’t been able to figure it out....
Is the act of making an impossible contract and then ‘selling’ it to the beneficiaries fraud?
——— (except military and certain positions where 10+ years experience serves some compelling public interest).
That would be difficult to enforce.
Who decides whether an employee serves a “compelling public interest”?
.
I blame Madigan, who has been in charge of the train wreck longer than half the people in the state have been alive.
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