I don't know about over-market, but it certainly feels high in real terms. Divide the total pension liability by the number of households in the state, and you get something approaching $150,000 per household, or about 2.5x the state's median household income. That's a pretty big burden of debt to have sitting on the shoulders of every resident of the state.

We've also got some pretty egregious cases to consider, which suggest that there aren't any guard rails around the pension system. The highest-paid pensioner in the state was able to retire at 55, and receives more than half a million annually. Plus the state's better-than-inflation 3% COLA.

The wise course would be for every working-age adult and operating business to avoid domiciling within the state of Illinois. It is already bankrupt, and it may take some time before everyone involved is willing to admit to it. I'm certainly not going to volunteer as tribute.

The big problem here is that we are expecting people to be bound to promises made by their predecessors, without ever being a party to those original negotiations. When one generation promises itself lavish benefits, to be paid for by future generations, they shouldn't be surprised when those future generations tell them to go pound sand. One of the big problems with the US model of government is that it never erected any enforceable barriers to kicking a can down the road long enough for it to become someone else's problem. It's just so easy to outvote the opposition, when they haven't been born yet.

So now we have this generational warfare, where the grandparents' generation took out loans, had a big party of borrowed prosperity, and then structured the payoffs to happen after they were all dead. Then the parents' generation decided they could only afford to have 2 kids instead of 3, and immigrants were no longer welcome, because jobs. Then that dead, skeletal hand finally reaches across the years to give young people a giant, bony middle finger, and then pick their nearly-empty pockets.

If those kids think school shootings are a threat to their lives, just wait until they graduate, and 80% of everything they earn is actually going toward helping the grandmas and grandpas pay for their little blue pills while breeding antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea in their luxury retirement communities. They'll want those guns back, when they're out nationalizing the assets of retirees, and herding them into assisted-living ghettos, chewing through property portfolios in order from eldest to youngest. That's what springs to mind whenever I think about Illinois's pension problem: "Screw you, you entitled assholes; you're going to get what's coming to you, and it isn't money."

Back when I was a kid, public sector jobs were known to pay less than private sector jobs, but offer stability and a pension.

They're also one of the few sectors of our working economy readily represented by unions.

My take on this is not that the public sector somehow struck it rich, but that the rest of us--those of us in the private sector--have had the screws put to us for a long long time, and that's why the public sector now looks fat and happy.

They didn't strike it rich, we struck it poor.

I'm not even sure about that. This is all anecdotal, but, the going rate for public jobs in my city is still quite low, and this does seem to have an impact on the quality of candidates they receive.

Since they can't attract candidates as effectively (frankly, that nice pension plan isn't nearly enough to make up for the crummy salary relative to what I can earn elsewhere), they aren't getting as many opportunities to hire really ambitious people. This has repercussions that play out in all sorts of ways, but, being a tech guy, the one I am most aware of is that acquaintances complain that the city often relies overmuch on low-tech and highly manual procedures for accomplishing basic tasks, because nobody is really motivated to streamline them. That results in lower per-employee productivity, which, in turn, increases the headcount requirements. Which, I'm guessing, increases overall labor costs relative to what they could be otherwise.

So it's not that the state's salary and pension costs are high because employees are well-compensated, it's actually something of the opposite.

Not true. Public sector salaries in places like Illinois are vastly higher than in other countries. Compare Illinois teacher and police salaries to the U.K. for an eye-opening surprise.

You're saying that when I was a kid, some 30 or 40 years ago, public sector employees were paid better than private sector employees?

I don't know about that, but check out the salaries at my kid's high school:

http://www.oprfhs.org/human-resources/documents/Over75KRepor...

At 50 names a page, you're on the bottom of the third page before you see the first person who isn't taking home six figures in base pay plus cash extra pay, before factoring in benefits.

These teachers are all part of the TRS pension plan and get lifetime pension at retirement. That's the jewel of the benefits package, but the rest of their benefits are pretty fucking excellent, too: cheap health insurance, huge numbers of vacation days.

Say what you will about the importance of teaching (and the fact that these comp numbers are perceived to flow right back into property values), these are not standard deals in the private market. They are, from the day you start your job to the day you retire, superior to the deal most private sector workers get.

> Say what you will about the importance of teaching

Just curious, how does the teaching compare with other schools in other states. I've been saying for a while that teachers should have high salaries like that because for one it matches the rhetoric of "think of the children" / "children first", and that teaching should be a prestigious job in line with engineer, finance, doctor or lawyer. So here is a case were salaries seem to be in the ballpark of being "prestigious" would you say the quality of teaching and the environment in school is correspondingly better?

It's a good school, but it's inferior to the Jesuit college prep high school I went to (except for the facilities, which are far better) where the teachers made much less.

They also get tenure (even in grade school). That sort of job security is worth a lot.

And they get 2 months of summer off.

Those aren't salary, but they are benefits that should be considered.