Illinois has a public employee pension problem due to decades of abuse and underfunding.
Why to government employees think they deserve a tax paid pension?
Rahm Emanuel is not popular on FR ... to put it mildly ... but it is worth remembering that when he became mayor of Chicago, he grabbed the third rail and tried to rein in public employee pensions.
For the simple reason that the pensions were (and are) bankrupting Chicago and Illinois, and a failure to deal with them will lock Chicago and Illinois in a doom loop.
He of course got nowhere, since the public employee unions basically run Illinois. As they do in California. They even ramrodded through a constitutional amendment providing that the public employee pensions were untouchable.
All of this is concentrated in Chicago and Springfield. The rest of the state knows that the cancer on the lake is killing the state. Illinois is now run by a looters' mafia. Everyone who can should get out while they can. The Bears aren't the first, nor will they be the last. Perhaps they are iconic enough to wake more people up.