After years of disappointment with get-rich-quick schemes, I KNOW I'm gonna get Rich with this scheme...and quick!

So Evanston (the city that northwestern resides in) was having some financial troubles last year. So they came up with a brilliant plan. Let people retire early. Now when you first hear that it sounds stupid, but let me explain. They decided that they would let anyone who was over the age of 50, and worked for the city for 20 or more years retire with full benefits (i'm not positive which city workers this encompasses, i'm sure it doesn't for example include cops or teachers so i'm thinking only people in the government.) How will paying people full benefits save money you ask? Well the theory is that they retire and you can hire someone much younger at a much smaller salary, and thus save money. They theorized that a handful of the 100 or so people eligible would try to take advantage of this opportunity. Instead of that handful 60 of them took the deal, including 8 of 9 department heads and the city chief executive. So this brilliant plan left the government essentially leaderless, and meanwhile, so many people retired and they are going to have to pay so many retirement benefits while promoting people to new leadership positions and paying them more that in fact it's going to end up costing the city even more. Well executed. On the bright side all the city workers who voted for and implemented this plan are now retired and living on full retirement plans.

On the bright note, the city is now facing a 140 million dollar deficit on the fireman and policeman pension fund, and they have no way to pay it. There solution? demand money from northwestern. Northwestern doesn't have to pay any property taxes, a fact that the city has resent for a generation. Even though northwestern was there first, and evanston wouldn't exist without northwestern. Any way, they are going to either try to force northwestern to pay property taxes (which they probably can't do) or else beg northwestern to give them money voluntarily. Which is what they are doing. Northwestern pays millions of dollars in other taxes as it is, on top of all the dollars that are pumped into the city by northwestern students. Meanwhile the city has been spending money it didn't have, promising pension funds it couldn't fulfill, and coming up with hair brained schemes that would be more at home in a simpsons episode than a city government, and their solution is Northwestern has lots of money, lets get some from them.

p.s. besides the problems of evanston, i'm pretty sure that soon the entire united states will be bankrupt from giving money to old people. As will all of europe. The amount of money promised to government employees in the form of pensions, is completely unsustainable. These are also contracts that i don't believe can be broken. You can't just say sorry, we don't have as much money as we thought we did. Oh well. They will raise taxes to generate more revenue, this will kill business, reducing revenue, so they will raise taxes more. They will almost certainly also have to borrow money, probably from old people because they will be the ones with all the money. Social security and pensions are going to be a far bigger problem, and far bigger crises than this current financial crises, but nobody wants to talk about it because old people all vote.