Illinois' Millionaire Pension Club

The Chicago Sun Times is doing a four part series on the state pensions system.
The first part is excerpted below, The Millionaire Pension Club.
Sunday: Double-dippers -- collecting a pension and a paycheck from the taxpayers.
Monday: Fat pensions for union bosses -- and you pay for those, too.
Tuesday: Can this mess be fixed?

The Millionaire Pension Club
Tim Novak, et al.

Nearly 4,000 retired government workers have pensions that pay them at least $100,000 a year. They include politicians, judges, doctors and school administrators, as well as top cops, firefighters and park officials.

Thanks to cost-of-living increases, former Gov. James R. Thompson (left) has seen his pension rise 50 percent since he retired. U.S. Sen. Roland Burris, who had served as attorney general and comptroller before retiring, has seen his pension rise nearly 50 percent.

More than half have collected more than $1 million each since they retired. A few have topped $2 million. And five have gotten more than $3 million each, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found.

And these numbers are soaring faster than taxpayers can afford.

Consider:

• 3,958 retirees have pensions paying $100,000 or more a year.
• 2,255 of those retirees have each collected more than $1 million in pension benefits. They include two doctors who have each gotten more than $3 million over the last 10 years.
• 14,280 retirees have pensions that pay them more than their final salaries. That's largely because all government pensions in Illinois automatically increase 3 percent every year.
• 11,521 retirees get checks from two or more government pension plans.
• 23 widows each get more than $100,000 a year, every year, in survivor benefits.
• 16 judges' widows have each gotten more than $1 million since their husbands died.
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Even as the economy has forced governments to cut services and jobs, they've had to borrow money or raise taxes to meet their soaring pension costs.

And the problem has lingered for decades, as elected officials continually postpone dealing with it, much like a homeowner putting off needed repairs. In fact, they've kept sweetening retirement benefits for themselves and others, even as they shortchanged the pension funds, diverting money to other programs and services. And early retirement programs have made things worse.

Read the whole article.