Residents Increasingly Fleeing New York, Los Angeles & Chicago

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by emathias

You can't just stop paying, but I wouldn't have an ethical problem with altering the way pensions are calculated, eliminating any minimum COLA adjustment (I'd even better okay eliminating it retroactively by freezing pension levels until actual inflation caught up to the outrageous guarantee of any minimum COLA above inflation. Forcing private citizens to supplement above-average pension COLA payments during a recession that saw real wages actually decline was and is not only unsustainable but outright immoral, contract or not. Writing such a contract should have been illegal in exchange for any constitutional guarantee for pension payments. The wording of the constitutional requirement in Illinois is terriblely unfair. A guarantee of pension value should absolutely have been allowed only with the inclusion of actuarial requirements making it impossible to underfund those pensions. That's the way to guarantee payments, not putting taxpayers on the hook for absolutely anything politicians decide to grant to labor negotiators. I'm not anti-Union, and think that workers should be paid what they were promised, but some of the promises made should have been illegal to even offer, *especially* without the law forcing full funding annually so that politicians literally couldn't make promises they either can't keep or will break the economic viability of the State.

This bears quoting. Couldn't agree more

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by Leveled

Everyone outside of Chicago is a leech. That includes the burbs.

Why outside of Chicago?

Many of the most corrupt public employee unions are from within the city.

I think there is plenty of sliminess to go around...