Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Servo
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$140,000,000,000+
That's how much debt this state is DROWNING in, of which the City of Chicago is solely responsible for more than 60 BILLION.
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I still have never seen a strong breakdown of what those numbers actually mean. Do you know what they mean, specifically?
How much of that number is debt with a dedicated source of funding? How much is unsecured non-pension debt? How much is Pension debt, and over what timeline is it calculated? 10 years? 30 years? 75 years?
Of the pension debt, how much of it actually needs to be paid in vs. how much could be grown out of with investment? What portion would a strong bull market eliminate the need of? How much bigger will it be if we have a sustained bear market?
Of those questions, the "how many years" one is the most critical. I mean, Illinois has an annual budget of almost $90 billion. $140 billion, if we could take 30 years to bring it into balance, would require paying a little over 5% of that annual budget toward the obligations.
Illinois' total GDP is over $600 billion. Over 30 years that's about $18 trillion dollars. $140 billion is less than 1% of that. $140 billion is about 2% of 30 years worth of payrolls in Illinois.
So, basically, if the only thing Illinois did was re-instate the income tax to 5%, that debt would be manageable. If Illinois managed to cut spending by 5% and kept revenues steady, we wouldn't even need to re-raise taxes to get the debt taken care of over 30 years.
In other words, the issue is not really a financial problem at the core, the issue is primarily a political one.