In the Jan. 26 Telegraph (“S&P lowers Illinois credit rating”), Sara Burnett of the Associated Press wrote, “Illinois has a $96 billion unfunded liability in its five state-employee pension funds, due to decades of shorting or skipping its pension payments.”

SURS went from 88.2 percent funded (only $247 million short of the 90 percent funding target) at the end of FY 2000, to being only 41.3 percent funded at the end of FY 2012 ($16.2 billion short of the 90 percent funding target).

SURS’s problems are from the last 12 years of overly-generous pensions and the poor economy, not from “decades of shorting and skipping” pension payments.