*ME! ME! {{{stutter-stutter-stutter}}}. I'm First!ME! ME!*
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.
We need a state bankruptcy law...
If states go bankrupt, they revert to territorial status.
- all bonds, contracts, pensions void
- no reps, no senators
- areas within may petition for separate statehood, once
solvency is proven
I blame it on Blago, Quinn and Madigan, Chicago, Cook Cty. Rauner? No way. IL was in much better shape before democrats took over.
California seems to be the maximum example of the syndrome.
Not in Illinois. And definitely not in Chicago.
Chicago has overpaid teachers who can’t teach...in many cases because the students aren’t ready or willing to learn.
The cops are overpaid crime historians that avoid the worst neighborhoods in the daytime and most neighborhoods during the night.
The politicians are so corrupt that they don’t even worry about being caught chasing a bribe... because everybody does it.
I left 16 years ago... and never looked back.
IL had a democrat governor from 2003 to 2015. I think they’ve had control of the General Assembly for a while too.
Not relevant to the thread but thanks.
Now that’s sensible and an excellent subject for an Amendment and whatever else can be Constitutionally done short of that.
Jim Edgar may have been a RINO, but IL was in pretty good shape when he was governor. So, I blame democrats.
Back in the mid fifties the comptroller of NYS set up the Fire and Police pension. Nelson Rockefeller was the govenor. The NYS Assembly passed legislation that only ONE person could access the funds in the pension system, the sitting NYS Comptroller. Not the Gov, not the assembly, not anyone. Today it is most likely the number retirement system in the US, having approx 150 Billion dollars in there. Over the years the social trouble makers tried to grab that cash, the courts wouldnt let them. It is so good that local taxpayers no more contribute to it. It virtually pays for itself.
So, it can be done.
*ME! ME! {{{stutter-stutter-stutter}}}. I'm First!ME! ME!*
100% ditto
There is NOTHING so disgusting as to watch the HARD-WORKING downstate Freeper Illini SUFFER so miserably because of the boil on the forehead of Illinois known as CHIRAQ.
So many states are underfunded pension wise, that takes a lot of time to happen. Same with Illinois, it just takes more than 8 to 15 years. Look at the national mess, it has taken decades of political promises to get us to the fiscal mess we have.
But Jesus H. Christ the imbalance between Joe Wheat Farmer of Mount Vernon and Rastus Gibbmedat of Cabrini Green is vastly, steeply more catastrophic than Rastus of Harlem and Joe Apple Farmer north of Albany, NY.
I wouldn’t put anyone still alive today anywhere near the top of the blame heap.
We knew decades ago that it would eventually be impossible to balance the math on pensions. And (at least where I lived) there was article after article detailing what eventually would happen. Like Whitewater, understanding the articles meant applying mathematics. Most people chose to believe whatever they wanted.
Today, most of the politicians who peddled these schemes around the country are gone. Old age and death shielded them from the blame.
You could try to blame the boomers for continuing the insanity but most of them were too young to vote as this all began.
Illinois has been de facto bankrupt for 50 years, paying for year n expenses from year n+2 tax revenues. Unless the year n expenses are goodies to the unions that run the state, or the welfare mob that elects it. All the while keeping just the one promise the ruling party values, to keep growing those goodies and so maintain their power.
Illinois needs to recoup as much as is possible, under something like RICO with treble damages for what is provable, what the crooked politicos, unions and welfare pimps have fraudulently taken. They need to write off the rest of their debt against the same. Then ban government unions, fire about 2/3 of their state workforce, rip out the welfare hammocks, zero their voting roles then restart them with strict voter id. But then I'm dreaming. What will happen is that more and more businesses and productive citizens will refuse to accept their late payments and big tax bills and flee the state. Until the parasites in Champaign and Chicago are left, alone with my dream as a nightmare.
Connecticut started driving businesses away several years ago and now housing prices are dropping at an alarming rate.
What is even more amazing is that the same leftist criminals who wrote these criminal contracts are trying to hobble President Trump, the only person would could potentially improve the economy enough so that all these pensions didn’t go bust.
Medicare and Medicaid will wipe out the rest. Everywhere.
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