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You're not paying attention to what I'm saying. I already conceded your scapegoat thing.
However the present-day effect of that misbehavior remains--today's unfunded pension liabilities means the taxpayers and public employees of decades ago definitely did not put enough of their money into these plans. Period. They benefited from the creation of these unfunded liabilities, because they got more out of the deal than they had to pay for. Pensions were supposed to be funded by employee deductions from their pay, plus employer match. Those contributions, both sides of it, were chronically far too low to justify the current level of benefits. That's not a subjective value judgment -- the existence of unfunded liabilities proves it. No one can honestly acknowledge the critical funded status of pensions and claim employee and taxpayer contributions were enough to justify the benefits. They couldn't have been.
That's bull****, straight away. No party acknowledges what I'm saying because it's political suicide. What I'm saying is grounded in basic pension finance and pure logic. Partisan sycophants are the ones that stick their heads in the sand and, in a display of pure, unwavering denial, shout "honor your debts, never cut pensions!"
Don't lie to yourself that I know nothing. Let's take one of the most severe examples. Illinois, for example, has no workable solution, not within its own power, anyway. The nature of this problem is that there is no viable solution. Current law requires they batter their tax base to death in attempt to pay these liabilities, and since they are already experiencing exodus, and have not gained significant ground with their pension problem despite the longest stock market bull run in history, they cannot solve this. They can't raise taxes enough to fix it without destroying their tax base, which makes subsequent tax increases futile.
That'd the end of the road. At that point they're begging for federal bailout money. It's unlikely the feds would fully bail out every dollar of unfunded pension debt, because of the moral hazard that creates across all multi-employer pensions.
Illinois' only technically (not politically) viable solution requires passing a state constitutional amendment to allow pension benefits to be cut before the state government completely fails and defaults. Fat chance of that with Pritzker the billionaire union hero just being elected governor and Madigan maintaining his eons-long domination over the legislature. But that's what it would require, because short of that, the state must attempt to squeeze every penny of its pension liability out of its residents, and it can't. The state's residents and businesses won't tolerate it. They already aren't. The state's unfunded pension liability is more than six times its total state operating revenue. That's a record for any state, ever, despite being near the probable tail end of history's longest stock market bull run. We should all be able to see the writing on the wall here: Illinois is ****ed.
You want to talk solutions for multi-employer pensions deep in critcally-underfunded territory? The solutions invariably require benefit cuts. If you are one of the many who automatically sweep that off the table, then you're one of the many who are anti-solutions and would apparently rather wait until they're completely broke and bankrupt and then see if the feds will bail them out with fiat money.
