Emanuel and Quinn Warn Illinois About Public Pensions Out of Control

The Chicago Tribune has an important editorial:

Gov. Pat Quinn and Mayor Rahm Emanuel appeared together Wednesday night at a Tribune forum deep inside Chicago's Field Museum. Looming over them onstage was a thousand-pound gorilla. No, not an escapee from a natural history exhibit upstairs. This beast, invisible yet the most powerful force in the room, is the pension crisis now menacing the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago and a shockingly long list of local governments statewide.

Quinn and Emanuel affirmed together what each of them has said separately: Rising pension costs threaten every spending priority, every program, every promising idea, that Illinois public officials propose. What's more, even as pension expenses consume enormous shares of incoming revenue, the pension funds still are strapped. Both men were abundantly aware of the startling news that the state's biggest pension fund, the Illinois Teachers' Retirement System, now warns that it may need to cut payouts promised to teachers, starting with those already retired.

This was the most promising discussion of this crisis we have yet heard.

The governor spoke of generous retirement benefits — retiree health care, compounded cost-of-living adjustments — that politicians have doled out to public workers. "Now," he said, "we have to deal with the fact that the money isn't there." He's waiting for a pension working group that will report to him this month before he details a rescue agenda.

The mayor described the dishonesty of a pension system fomented by pols who committed taxpayers to dole out more than they can afford to pensioners. If Chicago does nothing, he said, property taxes will have to rise by 150 percent — a prospect he rejected as unthinkable: "You won't recruit a business, you won't recruit a family to live here."

Rahm Emanuel deserves credit for even saying this in public. You'll want to read this entire editorial.