Illinois Pension Crisis

One essential aspect of my project was to find out what the other side was saying; what those legislators hiding in the capitol buildinghad been releasing to newspapers about the situation and the state of, well, the state. I decided that researching what the press was saying was important because that was half of the driving force behind the entire pension explosion: to a certain extent, it was a he-said-she-said game. The teachers were crying that it was the state's fault and the state was pointing their fingers at the teachers and somehow through all of the yelling, there was no way to truly understand what the truth was. I went on WSJ.com, found the US tab and began looking through the impressive collection of Illinois pension articles when I came across one article titled, "Illinois Pension Crisis Eludes Easy Solutions", written by Michael Corkery. In the article, it basically summarized the entire pension problem, but its focus seemed to zero-in on what he possible solutions were to the problem aswell as what lawmakers were hoping the revisions would be. "The lawmakers are also entertaining the politicallydifficult idea of applying broader pension changes made this year for newly hired employees to current workers". This could mean that new employees would be in a position of not recieving their pensions as early as others, it could mean having to pay more into the pension fund, some new teachers may not recieve their pensions at all, and even still, many districts may have other money taken out of school budgets to make up for the state's mistakes. These potential revisions also put the future of teachers at risk because without the availability to a pension and knowing that teachers do not have access to social security because of the pension program, many students may no longer entertain the idea of becoming a teacher due to insufficient benefits. However, the problem still remains...Illinois has $82 billion unfunded pensions liability that is projected to grow to $139.8 billion in 2030. So the question is, What is the fate of the pensions?