Illinois Pension Crisis

Again, looking through articles and trying to find my way into the facts, I found myself staring at an article from npr.org titled, "Shortfall Threatens Illinois Pension System". The author, David Schaper, took the approach I was looking for: really discovering what caused this mass pension crisis and what position the state is now in. "According to the Pew Center on the States, Illinois is worst in the nation when it comesto setting aside enough money for its pensions". Basically, Illinois is not meeting the standards already set for paying into pension funds and not overspending money that the state may not actually have. However, through a study in 2008 on states' pension funds, Illinois set aside just 54% of the money that's been promised to workers and retirees. Those kinds of shortcomings and lack of money has now set Illinois back $77.8 billion dollars that the state now owes towards pensions and unpaid pensions. Lawrence Msall, president of The Civic Federation, a Chicago-based group that keeps tabs on state and local government finances stated that, "...the pension underfunding has grown dramatically by almost 300 to 400 percent over the last decade, because the state has used gimmicks...it has ignored its pension obligations, it has borrowed or had partial pension holidays, and it has just flat out not made the adequate contributions to the pensions". These kinds of blatant ignorances for a state is simply appauling and not to mention widely unacceptable. Illinois has the worst track record in terms of staying on top of pension payments and meeting requirements, in many ways "shooting themselves in the foot" for future years. They are currently working on finding ways to meet the pension payments they owe, which at this point are simply growing each year. I guess the state will just have to sit back and see how the local government is going to handle this disaster.