Courtesy of Mish.
I just finished slogging through a 69 page PDF by the State Budget Crisis Task Force outlining the dire state of affairs in Illinois.
I knew in advance that pension funding is the biggest issue facing Illinois. The task force shows exactly that. Here is a summary.
Pension Funding Levels
- Teachers Retirement System (TRS) – 46.1%
- State University Employees Retirement System (SURS) – 45.3%
- State Employees Retirement System (SERS) – 34.9%
- General Assembly Retirement System (GARS) – 20.2%
- Judicial Retirement System (JRS) – 31.0%
Those funding levels assume 8% returns going forward, something that is not going to happen. So as bad as the above looks, the true pension underfunding is even worse.
Illinois’ infrastructure is in bad shape, and the report has the details.
There were many things in the report that I did not know about including the loopholes that let legislators pretend Illinois’ budget is balanced when it’s not.
Here is a surprising fact: Illinois has more governmental taxing agencies than any other state including California, a grand total of nearly 7,000 taxing bodies!
Here’s a juicy tidbit on infrastructure “Nearly two-thirds of Metra and CTA passenger rail cars were in a marginal state. Nearly half of Metra and CTA train stations were past their useful life, and about one-third of CTA and Pace buses were in the last quarter (or less) of their useful life.”
The report finished with “recommendations” but they were broad stroke, budgetary meaningless things like timely reporting, long-term planning, accrual planning, etc.
I am in favor of most of the report recommendations, but they will not solve a single problem.
Here is the scariest single sentence in the report “If the projected deficits were paid for by borrowing, debt service costs would grow to consume all sales tax and income tax collections in just five years.“…
