Political/Government Corruption

The first thing we all need to accept is this: what we owe for public employee retirement benefits, as currently constituted, cannot be paid. Under any reasonable scenario, the tab for public employee pensions…

By Bill Zettler What we can see from this discussion is the inherent unfairness of a system that rewards public employees far beyond what their employers, the taxpayers, have available to them. In Illinois…

By Bill Zettler #1 Source of the Problem: Salaries are too high. Basically the pensions are too lucrative and in many cases the salaries are too high compared to similar jobs in the private…

State of the State Pensions: What the Next Governor Needs to Say to the People of Illinois. A four part series. Over the last several months we have presented Champion News readers with a…

Unions Think Top 25 TRS Pensions Should Be $82 Million Higher. By Bill Zettler One of the top legislative priorities of the Illinois Education Association is a plan they call “80, 30 and out.”…

Would you pay $15,000 over four years to get $1.3 million over the next 29? In my last article “Pension Insanity” I documented how some teachers can get pensions more than twice their salaries….

I guess it’s OK though; it’s for the kids. Every time I think I cannot possibly be any more cynical about public pensions and salaries than I already am, I find some new data…

By Bill Zettler Top 100 average $114,000 for only 28 years work. One of the state pension systems we don’t talk about much is SURS (State University Retirement System). SURS is the system with…

The 5% of Illinois workers who are in the state pension systems cannot have an unlimited claim on the 95% who are not. The one huge problem with the current pension system is the…

As I’ve mentioned the past few days, the more you learn about the Illinois pension systems the more you realize the time for compromise has past. The price for the willful ignorance on the…

Continuing this review of R. Eden Martin’s two-in-one-day essays about the public pension problem, this column turns to his piece published in the Wall Street Journal. Here is how R. Eden Martin begins his…

Let’s continue with R. Eden Martin’s two-in-one-day op eds. First, the Trib’s: “Pensions: All our problem.” As I said yesterday, it’s absolutely NOT all our problem. Here’s how he opens the piece: Leaders of…

I’m sure R. Eden Martin, the president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, is a lovely man. And I hear that many people think his group is doing yeomen’s work…

By Bill Zettler Wisconsin: Top Teacher Salary $89K Less Than Illinois Top Teacher, Top Superintendent $170K Less. If Illinois wants a model of how to run a public school system for a reasonable cost…

(Originally posted 4-20-10.) Quinn: Pension Reform Will Save $400 Million in 2011. Zettler: Pension Deficit Will Increase More than $50 Billion by 2014. Governor Pat Quinn signed the pension reform bill and immediately claimed…