$887,925,790 is a lot of money.
It’s a huge pile of money when you learn what it’s for: the pensions of just the top 100 public school administrators in Illinois. That’s nearly $1 billion dollars for the pensions of 100 people, or an average yearly pension of $306,181.30 per administrator.
That’s nothing to sniff at.
The highest pension was valued at over $26 million dollars for a 29 year period. This is more money than most people make in a lifetime – just in pension payments for a public sector employee.
And we wonder why schools are running out of money, and why no matter how much of the stuff we throw at the problem, it doesn’t seem to make a difference in actual education outcomes.
Possibly – and this is a stretch, I know – but possibly actually putting that money toward children’s educations rather than toward hugely bloated pensions for public servants might actually make a difference.
This is where I see the real battle in the politics of public spending. At a certain point, truly egalitarian liberals are going to look at the stranglehold public sector workers have over state spending and realize that it’s inhibiting spending on other important things – from school supplies to healthcare for the poor.
Then they’re going to have to make a choice – side with the big public sector unions and sacrifice the poor and disadvantaged, or take a new approach to the public sector altogether and stop paying out these ridiculous benefits and retirement packages to people who probably don’t deserve them.
There are such things as 401k’s which do nicely for most people in the private sector. Most of us aren’t guaranteed hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for not working after the age of 56. Unfortunately, we are expected to pay into a system that has chosen to line the pockets of school administrators at the expense of children and taxpayers alike.
Before we talk about bailing out shortfalls in school budgets, we should take a look at where the money’s going.
