governor, it was squeezy that python. why is that the fed s responsibility to bail people out of their own bad decision-making? it might be good politics to do that, president obama porting the people who supported him, but it very bad economics. in illinois, you ran the tape of the pension python. that python is $233 billion in the state of illinois. those that don t have the money. what they should be doing is addressing the pension problem. they are not doing so. beneath the surface, the desire for help from someone else. megyn: think about how this makes the people of detroit deal. there are probably some that agree with joann watson. but others are probably thinking, you fix it. we put you in the city council.
the government has increased its attack on the center even though rebels did have hand-to-hand with heavy weapons last week. the helicopters and jet fighters are moving too much for them. shannon: republicans pouncing on a pu report that a member of president obama s inner circle took $100,000 in speaking fees from a company tied to iran. reports say david plouffe gave a pair of speeches to a subsidiary of a telecom company two months before he joined the white house staff. that company was doing business with iran at the time. he calls republican criticism misplaced. steering numbers on illinois pension problem as governor quinn released a study showing
the largest u.s. city so far so ever file for bankruptcy. so what does that mean and can we expect more cities to fail like this? stu varney is here to talk about all this. stu, what happened in stockton? ok, the city spent big when times were good. right. it then went through an awful real estate crash. gave 15% unemployment in the city. it then cut back its budget dramatically, a quarter of the cops were fired. a third of the firefighters laid off. 40% of the employees all gone but still, not enough to meet that pension obligations. yet again, this is another city in a state where they ve got a huge pension problem. and they made promises and they simply cannot pay. the unions wouldn t give back on pensions and they pushed them to the brink of bankruptcy and now they re over the cliff. what does this mean ok, so stockton, california, 300,000 people in that town. their city is going bankrupt. what does it mean, first of all, for california which is also bankrupt and the un
huge budget problem here, right? you have the pension problem which causes that, it s $81 billion of long-term debt created over the years. we ve got a $9 billion deficit in the budget which we can t make up this year alone, but we have reduced are trying to reduce this budget which we hope to pass in the next couple of days, which will reduce last year s spending by as much as $6 billion, as well as tied with that a medicaid reform that we just passed that reduces that budget by 2.5 billion. yeah there is a lot of issues that are out there. bill: i apologize for the interruption. a lot of states are going through this. illinois gap is enormous. the budget gap for 2013, california is at 15 billion, which is huge, but illinois, a much smaller state is at 1.8 bill kwrorpbgs it goes from there to massachusetts, louisiana, then florida. those are your top five. you were saying? right, and the thing is you can t continue to spend money
you don t have. you know, government has got to stop growing so big. i ve been trying to say that for years, and unfortunately this has just been kind of ram rodded for the last ten years spinning out of control. the pension problem has been a lot longer than that, but the actual budget problem that we have right now has been over the last ten or 11 years. bill: i don t know how you re going to solve it but we re going to follow it. we ve seen stories, watched them in ohio and illinois. so many folks are going through this right now. when you go back to the state house today, what are you going to be like? well, i m going to tell you that my hope is that maybe we sent a clear message yesterday that we will continue down a path of working together in a bi-partisan manner. understand this issue was an issue that we the republicans had taken a lead on and all of a sudden the rug had been pulled out from underneath us and those things that we were trying to do in a sensible manner were j