You can’t pour a gallon of liquid into a quart container. It just won’t work. If you’re really dense and don’t have sense enough to realize that and stop in time, three quarters of that liquid that you poured are going to spill over the rim of the one-quart container, splash onto your counter top, and drip onto the floor.
Don’t believe us? Try it for yourself. You’ll see. Try it several times. The result will always be the same: a big mess.
Conversely, you can’t pour a gallon’s worth of liquid out of a quart container. Fill that quart container with whatever liquid you choose and pour it into a gallon container and you’ll never fill it more than one fourth full, unless you do it four times.
Basic math, right?
Sure, it seems obvious, but try explaining it to state legislators – or any public servant with luxurious pension benefits.
Unlike the citizens who pay their salaries and have to live in the real world, public servants live in Magic Land, where quart containers can fill gallons and gallons and gallons and never run out.
It must be nice to live in Magic Land.
Just ask former Illinois state legislators receiving more than $100,000 a year in pension benefits whose total contributions to their retirement plans were less than what they now receive annually. No wonder Illinois’ pension debt is over $137 billion, perhaps as high as $241 billion.
That’s because more than 300 former lawmakers are collecting more than $21 million annually after contributing less than $30 million collectively toward their retirements, according to an Illinois Policy Institute study. This is how they reward themselves at our expense for decades of mis- and malfeasance.
Do any of us ordinary citizens working in the private sector in the real world have ridiculously generous benefits like this? Do our employers reward us for decades of incompetent performance, not to mention sabotage?
No, of course not. But we’re not living in Magic Land.
Maybe it’s time to tell our public servants that they can’t live there either.