Totaling the unsustainable tax increases and windfall revenue during Pritzker Administration – Wirepoints
May 26, 2026
23 Comments
With $162 billion more from taxpayers, couldn’t you deliver a few bond upgrades, too
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A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
The Illinois Pension Scam.
The state sponsored Illinois Pension Ponzi Scheme.
Manipulating taxpayers day after day, week after week, month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year, decade after decade.
Pensions are the state’s opioids.
You can reach any conclusion you want if you make ridiculous assumptions, like the state holding current pension contributions constant in nominal terms while revenues naturally grow 3-4% annually even in the absence of tax increases. In any case, even with the most pessimistic of assumptions, the Social Security trust funds will run out well before the state pension systems exhaust their assets, but this does not necessarily mean that benefits will be cut, just paid from general revenues on a pay as you go basis.
Andrew – I don’t follow you. If the City of Chicago had to pay, for example, the 18 percent funded fire pension on a pay as you go basis, it would be a disaster, requiring huge property tax increases and squeezing out many other objectives, including paying other pension contributions. An event like this would be the first heavy domino to fall (if any of us learned from 2008). And in such a situation, I would not count on the bond markets to save the City. The realistic agenda is for the City to hope Democrats are running the federal… Read more »
Bankruptcy now