Raise taxes, of course!
That's the advice of experts in Illinois, anyway.
You can see why they panic: The unfunded portion of Illinois's public employee pension system amounts to $11,000 per person in the state. Something extraordinary must be done.
Yet, as Pat Hughes at the Illinois Opportunity Project insists, taxpayers need relief — not a statewide 1 percent property tax increase.
Besides, it is not as if tax hikes could solve the problem. "It was just last year that politicians raised the state income tax by 32 percent in a desperate attempt to balance the budget," Hughes explains. "Despite over $5 billion in new taxes, the state was back in deficit spending in less than a year."
Hughes mentions a number of tax limitation measures in the works. More power to them.
But what's needed even more? Spending limitation measures.
No government can be trusted to offer anything but defined-contribution pensions — and no government, at any level, should ever manage a pension system. Politicians can't help themselves. They just cannot resist the temptation to buy off the government-worker constituency by promising more in the future than financially feasible (or just plain old politically possible) to pay for now.
Other people's money is theirs to spend. And a future financial bind? Some other politician's problem.
This is Common Sense. I'm Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.
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