John Dillon writes me after a meeting with Representative Jeanne Ives. She wants to turn our pension into a Ponzi scheme. “Let’s get naked.”
MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2013
Re: A Meeting with Jeanne Ives at Panera Bread in Naperville by John Dillon
Hey, Fred -You missed a great meeting, Fred. Glen and I have been wrong all this time. We make too much money, not too little, or even enough or what we deserve. Before the meeting we may have believed in the legalities of the Illinois Constitution and the concept of a vested protection with Article XIII, Section 5; we might have thought that a 401k was not an acceptable form of retirement savings and would never pass federal scrutiny; we erroneously held on to the silly conviction that as taxpayers we too were taken advantage of when the state legislature took holidays – not to mention being burglarized by the theft of our pension earnings; we held a blind faith in our unions who are still complicit in dealing a bad hand to all of us who worked so hard as public employees; we might have obtusely considered the state’s problems a revenue issue; we might have wrongly figured the debt issue is separate from the normal costs; we might have been allowing the past history of investments in 401k’s color our better judgment that ownership of our own financial futures is better than the