Illinois’s largest public pension reduced its forecast for how much it expects to earn from its investments each year, a step that will likely force the state to boost its annual contributions to the cash-strapped retirement plan.

The Board of Trustees for the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, which serves almost 400,000 teachers, voted Friday to cut the assumed rate of return to 7 percent from 7.5 percent. The rate assumption is used to decide how much taxpayer money needs to be set aside each year to cover pension checks due in the coming decades.

“We have to do what we believe is the right thing,” Richard Ingram, the pension’s executive director, said during the board meeting in Springfield.

Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a suite of bills into law this week focused on criminal justice reforms, including one which limits how much prisoners pay for phone calls.

The laws come as Rauner seeks a 25-percent reduction in Illinois’ prison population by 2025. The signing of the bills coincides with the release of a new report detailing the “collateral consequences” of having a felony conviction in Illinois.

Rauner signed the bills at a ceremony in one of the Illinois Department of Corrections’ adult transitional centers near Chicago.

There is indeed a sausage king of Chicago and, contrary to popular belief, it is not Abe Froman, the mythical sovereign of tubed meat immortalized in the 1986 classic “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Oh, Vienna Beef CEO Jim Bodman will deny it, but who else?

Almost 50 years ago, Bodman took his first Vienna Beef job as a warehouse worker and started working his way up. In 1983, Bodman and business partner Jim Eisenberg bought the company. At 75, Bodman doesn’t appear to be slowing down much. The septuagenarian wears mustard yellow pants to work, flies his family to the Bahamas in his own private jet, and, just recently, got his motorcycle license for the first time. That zippy new Vespa isn’t going to ride itself.

If you plan on protesting your high McHenry County property-tax bill by paying it in small denominations, it would behoove you to clear your calendar for that day.

A new poll conducted for the Illinois Economic Policy Institute shows that Chicago voters trust Mayor Rahm Emanuel to handle Chicago’s budget over Gov. Bruce Rauner.

The survey, conducted by Anzalone Liszt Grove Research, was comprised of 600 Chicagoans who voted in at least one of the last three Chicago mayoral elections. The poll was conducted via telephone between Aug. 8-11. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.

llinois was ranked one of the nation’s worst states for taxes in a new survey released Thursday by financial forecaster Kiplinger.

The survey ranked Illinois as the nation’s ninth-worst state for taxes. Kiplinger’s review included a tenuous forecast for the state’s taxes, despite the fact the state’s income tax dropped to a flat rate of 3.75 percent from 5 percent at the start of 2015.

I give up. House Speaker Michael Madigan, Senate President John Cullerton and my state Rep. Ann Williams all win.

I’ve lived in Illinois nearly all my life and have lived in Chicago since 1988. I’m a proud graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have mostly been proud to say I’m a citizen of Chicago.

But the Democratic machine has changed all that. Fiscal mismanagement and runaway spending coupled with an unsustainable pension system and dirty politics have left us with a $100 billion pension deficit and a budget more than $7 billion in the red. Madigan and his goons say that Gov. Bruce Rauner refuses to compromise, even while Rauner has agreed to raise taxes. But Democrats refuse to accept any of his badly needed pension and business reforms. Their solution to all of our problems are ever-increasing taxes on a citizenry finding it more and more difficult to make ends meet. Illinoisans are asked to tighten their belts while the government and public employees get more and more.

More so than most human institutions, democracy is fragile.

You’re stuck with your family and—thank God—they’re stuck with you. An army can perpetuate itself by pulling out its guns and demanding compliance. Free enterprise works because of presumed greed on all sides.

But for democracy to work, to really work, trust is required. And trust is oh so easily lost.

That’s the real tragedy of yesterday’s Illinois Supreme Court decision, one that for the second election cycle in a row threw out for technical reasons a stunningly broad-based citizen effort to dilute the power of insiders in drawing state House and Senate district lines.