Democrats have essentially had complete control of Illinois, with super majorities in the House and Senate, for years.

As an Illinois resident, I have the wonderful fortune of listening to Democrats brag about the financial “health” of the Illinois budget. They claim they balanced the budget and now have over $1 billion in a rainy-day fund. (For perspective, that is like a family making $100,000 having $2,000 in a savings account.)

Meanwhile, Illinois pension funds declined by nearly ten billion dollars in FY 2022.  If Illinois were a private business, that $9.8 billion would show up as a loss; there is nothing remotely balanced about the Illinois budget. According to a Chicago business report:

Illinois’s massive debt to the retirement funds was built up by years of failing to set aside enough to cover all the benefits that have been promised. It has been a major financial drag, leaving Illinois with a lower bond rating than any other US state and forcing it to pump more tax money into the system to catch up.

The president and his fellow Democrats love rewarding their political supporters with kickbacks, so they bailed out the Teamsters Union, to buy votes, with $35.8 billion because of mismanagement and over-promising for decades. 

(The money came from the $1.9 trillion slush fund that was sold to the public as COVID relief.)

See below: 

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation announced Thursday that Central States Teamsters’ private union pension will receive $35.8 billion in taxpayers’ money.

Behind this bailout is a tragic history of reckless actions by self-seeking unions and muddied political favoritism that allowed the problem to fester for decades unchecked.

…

Between 2006 and 2018, underfunding of plans nearly quadrupled, from $200 billion to $757 billion. Multiemployer plans currently have only 42 cents for every dollar of benefits they’ve promised.

Does anyone think that Democrats wouldn’t also use taxpayer and borrowed money to bail out underfunded government pension plans if they could get it passed?

Congress passed the sensible ERISA law in 1974, which requires private businesses to properly recognize and fund their pension and health care promises — but of course they exempted government entities.

Private companies have tremendously reduced defined benefit pension plans because they could no longer hide the massive potential liabilities from their shareholders. 

If government entities were required to properly fund and recognize a proper rate of return we wouldn’t have this huge problem that totals trillions of dollars.

Government pensions are essentially Ponzi schemes where future investors (taxpayers) pay for current expenses. The liabilities and future problems dwarf the fraud at FTX by the crypto crook.

Instead of addressing the massive liabilities on the books, Biden, and other Democrats, among other things, want to bail out students who willingly borrowed the money. Instead of addressing the problem of high costs at colleges they just throw more taxpayer money at dimwitted people to buy their votes.

The solution for Democrats is always more government money. Trump’s overriding policy was to give the power and money back to the people and the media sought to destroy him every day. Democrats overriding policy is to confiscate more power and money for the government and most of the media cheers them on.

The choice is easy if we want the U.S to survive as a great country.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.