Associated Press Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs legislation establishing a 2020 voter referendum on a graduated income tax. If it passes, he vows to spend at least $200 million a year from the proceeds on pensions, but he has been cool to the idea of cutting retiree benefits.

"Everybody's looking for a silver bullet. I don't think there is one," says Edgar, referring to calls for the state or its pension funds to seek bankruptcy, or end pensions altogether, to fix things.

"It's politics," former Mayor Rahm Emanuel told me on one of his final days in office, reflecting on how he'd done more than his predecessors to cure the city's pension problems, but still left a $1 billion hole for successor Lightfoot to fill in the next two years.

Rulings by the Illinois Supreme Court "really (have) us in a death grip," says former state Rep. Elaine Nekritz, one of the chief authors of a 2013 rescue plan that would have forced workers and not just taxpayers to bear some of the cost of a fix. "It's basically what they told us: Go find a way to pay for it."

If you can.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

So how do we get out of a fix that has us competing to claim the worst-funded pension system in the nation? The place to start is looking at how Illinois got here, and not repeating it.

According to COGFA, the biggest reason for the state's pension woes is that lawmakers, be they Democrat or Republican, for many decades consistently failed to set aside what actuarially is required. Instead, the money has been diverted to more immediately pressing and arguably more popular needs.

"It's human nature," says Charlie Wheeler, a longtime watcher of state government from his perch as head of the public affairs reporting program at the University of ­Illinois at Springfield. " ‘Long term' is the next election, in two years. Schools have to open right now, but a lot of people don't care very much about pensions that will be paid in 20 years."

In budget season, "reducing the pension payment causes the least pain," says Tim Blair, executive director of the $17.5 billion State Employees' Retirement System, which covers nonteaching workers.

With unions also focused on the short-term bottom line—pay hikes for their members­—lawmakers repeatedly found cause for a pension payment holiday, in which the state makes less than its normally required payment. But, like putting the mortgage payment on your credit card, the bill eventually comes due with interest.

The most notorious example—and there have been several through the years—came under Gov. Rod Blagojevich in fiscal 2006 and 2007, after officials decided to refinance part of the state's pension debt by issuing a giant $10 billion pension obligation bond.

As a pure arbitrage play, the strategy has worked, says then-state Chief Financial Officer John Filan, who asserts that the state made more money from investing POB proceeds than it had to pay to borrow. The problem is that Blagojevich skimmed more than $2 billion off the top to pay for other state programs. That left the pension funds little better off than they were, because the state suspended making its full regular annual payments.