The evidence continues to mount:  Illinois's new elected officials and their advisors simply don't believe that it matters that public pensions are pre-funded.  They view pension funds as something that exists on paper, and pension reporting as a nuisance to be avoided where possible, and ignored otherwise.  … they think of public pensions as pyramid schemes, in which new participants pay the retirees' pensions.  And while that's true of Social Security, it's a terrible and terribly harmful approach for state-employee pensions.