VIDEO. “It’s a revenue problem. Not a pension problem.” Tax the rich.
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Guest blog: The chutzpah of Illinois!
By Mark Stefanik, middle school teacher.
Mike Madigan – “They (teachers, cops, firemen, state employees of all kinds) are going to get less in retirement than they thought they would.”
Didn’t Speaker Madigan contradict the Constitutional protections afforded the pension systems with these words? If this is not a call for reduction of benefits, what is? Don’t he get that our protected pensions were being protected from politicians like him? Can’t he understand that our pension money was recognized as such a temptation that wiser, tougher, more democratic leaders of the state wished to place it outside the grasp of scheming, short-sighted politicos?
The very crisis this state faces is the very thing that the Illinois Legislature foresaw in the 1970s, pensions perceived as piggy banks subject to political exigencies.
Sure enough, the state couldn’t resist the lure of our savings. Like a broke and drunken father, it robbed the
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