k-12 tax & $pending climate: “It’s how $17 B has turned into a whopping $144 B”
In 1994, the General Assembly awoke to a then-unheard-of pension debt of $17 billion. In typical Illinois fashion, lawmakers cooked up a 50-year repayment plan to “fix” the problem. It was called a ramp because little of the debt was repaid immediately, and most of it was pushed out decades into the future. A graphic of the repayment schedule looks exactly like an upward-sloping ramp. Gov. Jim Edgar signed the bill into law, giving it its name.
Conveniently, all pension benefit increases passed since then — and any increases in benefit obligations found due to poor actuarial assumptions — have been pushed onto the ramp. It’s how $17 billion in outstanding pension debt at the state level has now turned into a whopping $144 billion.
