Illinois is fucked. stuck in a repeating cycle of taxing and falling further behind. taxing more, falling further behind.
the pension liabilities are the primary issue and what has been done about that? zip.
the dems don't want to piss off the unions and are therefore unwilling to point out the obvious. Almost nobody gets pensions any longer. That these public sector workers are still pulling these sorts of benefits for driving a desk is insane.
The state is literally going bankrupt and the politicians still won't do anything about the problem because doing so would hurt them politically. fuggin joke.
There is currently no state bankruptcy statute so technically it will be a default. That will probably result in an independent counsel and higher muni yields not to mention a lot off D politicians heading off to jail.
I'll agree with all of that, except the politicians heading off to jail.
they own the courts here too. Supreme Court elections are filthy with 'donations', making judges the same as politicians in terms of relying on donors to fill their coffers for elections, which run into the millions here.
See this case, where State Farm secretly funded a Judicial election in Illinois in an apparent attempt to pack the court to rule in their favor on a previous ruling, and settled this just last year to avoid an actual RICO case trial
State Farm Agrees to Pay $250 Million, Avoids Racketeering Trial
State Farm Agrees to Pay $250 Million, Avoids Racketeering Trial
"State Farm agreed to pay $250 million on the brink of a trial to customers who claimed the company tried to rig the Illinois justice system to wipe out a $1 billion jury verdict from 19 years ago."
"The biggest U.S. auto insurer was accused in the case of leading an effort to recruit a judge friendly to its cause for the Illinois Supreme Court, secretly funding Judge LLoyd Karmeier’s 2004 election campaign by funneling money through advocacy groups that didn’t disclose donors. Under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, any damages would have been tripled."
"In 1999, an Illinois state court jury awarded the customers $456 million for breach of contract, and the trial judge added $730 million in damages on a fraud claim. An appellate court reduced the verdict to $1.056 billion, but it was one of the largest class-action awards in U.S. legal history.
In 2004, Karmeier, a Republican who had been a circuit judge in rural Washington County for almost two decades, was elected to the Illinois Supreme Court. A year later, that court threw out the award, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case, seemingly ending the litigation."
I don't see a solution to the state's problems. To work with the pensions will require an amendment to the state's Constitution, as a law passed in 2013 to try to dial it back was thrown out by the Illinois Supreme Court as unconstitutional- and that amendment will never happen due to political reasons, IMO.
