06/15/10 Stockholm, Sweden – California and Illinois state budgets have been a mess for some time now, as you would expect when expenses are wildly in excess of revenues.
Here’s the latest vivid example of how far off course they’ve gotten in Illinois… the estimated pension liability for just the 100 top school administrators is now about $888 million. That’s right… nearly one billion dollars… or about $9 million per administrator.
Here are the numbers crunched by Bill Zettler, via The Daily Bail (click to visit a bigger version):
As would be expected in a pension spread, the numbers are not evenly distributed. One listed administrator in particular is expected to require a pension of over $26 million during his 29 years of retirement. His student must have learned their curriculum especially well. Thanks to his serving many noble years as a public “servant” it only makes sense to reward that effort, and sacrifice, with about $1 million per year of retirement.
Further, it’s a good thing President Obama is now also allocating $50 billion to bailout states’ teachers, police, and firefighters. There’s clearly a posh lifestyle for the top echelon that must be maintained at all costs.
In fact, the President’s approach makes plenty of sense. Why bother with a traditional method like trimming the fat from state budgets? It could turn out to be far more innovative and effective to just inject more fat into the original fat this time around. We should definitely give this idea a shot as well… because you can’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. You can read more details at The Daily Bail, just in case you thought only California was out of contol.
Best,
Rocky Vega,
The Daily Reckoning
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of Agora Financial International, where he advances the growth of Agora Financial publishing enterprises outside of the US. Previously, he was publisher of The Daily Reckoning, and founding publisher of both UrbanTurf and RFID Update -- which he ran from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico -- as well as associate publisher of FierceFinance. Rocky has an honors MS from the Stockholm School of Economics and an honors BA from Harvard University, where he served on the board of directors for Let’s Go Publications, Harvard Student Agencies, and The Harvard Advocate.
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Why do you pay these guys so much???
Couldn’t they save a little from their astounding salaries for retirement years?
Couldn’t the school boards find equally capable people to work for, say, $80,000?
Yes you are right. The fat is surely out of the frying pan. But how do we put out this grease fire?
GC-K