Lake County Gazette

Illinois state Rep. David McSweeney (R-Barrington Hills) points to the state’s ongoing pension woes as the root cause of the alarming rate of outmigration.

“Residents are fleeing our state because of massive tax hikes,” McSweeney posted on Facebook. “Illinois' broken employee pension system needs to be reformed. I'm fighting to fix the broken systems and cut taxes.”

With the state’s long-lingering financial problems virtually touching every avenue of society, McSweeney knows he has his work cut out for him in trying to get things back on track. Homeowners have been especially hard hit by the malaise as a weaker economy inevitably tends to lead to a more depressed housing market and thus lower property values. 

The Chicago Tribune pegs the state’s latest levels of unfunded pension liability somewhere in the neighborhood of $137 billion, clouding forecasts that seek to lay out the state’s future. At the same time that thousands of workers are preparing to move into the newly refurbished old Chicago post office, the Tribune reports that prices for office buildings, retail centers and industrial real estate across the city are down by more than 4 percent and that the dollar volume on deals has been cut by nearly half.

While some argue the best way to save Springfield from itself lies in figuring out a way to curb public-pension benefits, McSweeney insists there are other variables at work that are causing almost as much damage.

“We need to end corruption in Illinois,” McSweeney wrote in a separate post. “Do you support my bill to add five years of prison time to the sentence of General Assembly members who are convicted of felonies?”