It's never good news when the Illinois legislature starts talking pension reform.

They never get it right.

It’s that time of year again.

The Illinois legislature is talking pension reform.

Lock up your sons and daughters and hide your wallet.

Trust me. Nothing good can come from this.

As of November 2022, the state’s five pension systems collectively had $248 billion in liabilities, but only $109 billion in assets to cover those liabilities.

That means the state is in debt to the tune of $139 billion to the five state public pensions.

The state would have to win yesterday’s Powerball lottery 39 times to pay the debt.

And then keep up their payment obligations.

The failure to keep up their payment obligations is what got the state in this mess in the first place.

The Illinois House Personnel & Pensions Committee met yesterday to begin discussing a fix.

But, of course, there is no fix to the hole they dug.

Somebody has to pay.

Or they can wait until all the Tier 1 pensioners are dead.

"We have a fiscal system that really can't put the money into funding this ramp without either a tax increase, a relatively significant one, and or cutting spending on services, neither or which are sort of the best outcomes for taxpayers," Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability and professor at Roosevelt University told the House Committee

"It's like a kid that's just got out of college and has too much money on their credit cards and now you're paying and the monthly cost is making it hard to find an apartment to live in," said Andrew Bodewes with the Illinois Teacher Retirement System. "That, I think, is probably a better description of what this unfunded liability is doing to you. You feel it in your budgets every year because it is expensive to maintain that debt."

Leave it to some of the legislators to suggest the fix is cutting benefits.

They’ve tried that before with two results, both which came back to bite them in the ass.

A cut to benefits of then current members of the systems led to the Illinois Supreme Court ruling unanimously that it was unlawful.

The creation of a Tier 2 for those hired after 2011 will ultimately fail to meet federal law and billions more will likely be owed.

The Illinois legislature: The gang that can’t shoot straight.