Planned Destruction?

We're having a difficult time interpreting this any other way:

• Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced late Friday afternoon that he signed the Chicago pension sweetener bill.

  This is one of the most financially reckless decisions in modern Illinois history, on par with Mayor Richard M. Daley’s parking meter deal.

  Chicagoans deserve to know the truth about why Pritzker did it. And that may require going to court. More on that in a bit.

  What happens now?

  The governor’s timing could not have been worse.

  The city already faces a $1.2 billion budget deficit, the Chicago Transit Authority is staring down a fiscal cliff, and Chicago Public Schools is in financial freefall.

  The bill adds more than $11 billion in unfunded liabilities to two of the worst-funded pension systems in the entire country: Chicago police and fire. Those funds will fall to 18% funded, speeding up a march toward insolvency. The bill will also almost certainly trigger a downgrade for Chicago’s credit rating, returning the city to “junk” status.

There's a lot to unwrap here, but adding $11 billion in unfunded liabilities to a pension fund already staggering into a sea of red ink is reckless in the extreme. Fata$$ and Springfield aren't offering any assistance to Chicago, just stacking on the future insolvency.

Any word from the unions yet about what this all means? And don't be tooting the benefits today if the whole thing goes belly up tomorrow. 

And Conehead better start looking at cutting waste, redundancy and closing under-utilized schools as a first step toward fiscal sanity. 

UPDATE: Here's another article about things.