Outrageous Pensions Turning Ill. Teachers into Millionaires

-By Warner Todd Huston

Over at Champion News Bill Zettler has been doing a fantastic job of following and chronicling the completely out of control pensions of Illinois public employees and this week he asks why Governor Quinn wants to raise taxes just to make millionaires of retiring teachers.

Zettler found two teachers that will be making in excess of a million dollars in pension payouts.

Check out this obscene total:

“So that’s $944,000. But as they say on the TV ads ‘That’s not all folks!’ They also receive family health insurance worth $19,000 each and as we know 30% of the salary ($102,000) is paid into the state pension system for each teacher. Add in 15 sick days and 3 personal days per year and you have well over $1 million in total compensation for two teachers.”

Go on over to Bill’s report and see how this obscene ripoff of the taxpayers was calculated and also see a list of some of the highest pensions n the state — all from the education sector.

Zettler also has some good ideas on how to begin to fix this.

I’ll offer one more.: ELIMINATE public employees unions. Simply cancel them. Make them illegal. Public employees unions exist for ONLY one purpose and that is to steal as much of the taxpayer’s money as possible. They aren’t interested in quality of work for the people, they aren’t interested in what’s good for government, they aren’t interested in efficiency. They exist solely to ripoff the taxpayers. Getting rid of these leeches is the first step toward beginning to get a handle on this mess.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.


Copyright Publius Forum 2001