Institute in the Wall Street Journal: In Praise of Illinois

The WSJ calls the bill that recently passed out of the Illinois legislature and important first step toward fixing Illinois public pension funding problem.

In Praise of Illinois
Democrats take baby steps on pension reform.

The Pew Center on the States recently honored Illinois as the state with the biggest public pension mess. So it’s a minor miracle that the state’s Democratic legislature passed, and Democratic Governor Pat Quinn is expected to sign, a pension reform that at least takes baby steps in trimming the state’s retirement largesse for its 700,000 government workers. Perhaps bankruptcy concentrates the mind…

As Kristina Rasmussen of the Illinois Policy Institute points out, “these were the bare minimum reforms. They only apply to newly hired employees, not existing employees.” The reforms thus do nothing to close the existing unfunded liability. A worker that has been on the job for one month still qualifies for the old pension windfall.

Read the full article from the Wall Street Journal here.