The fine folks at the Illinois Policy Institute love numbers.

They love to add them, subtract them, crunch them and analyze them.

They also like to dispel them.

The group’s cause of the day is the plan passed by lawmakers to resolve Illinois’ underfunded pension crisis. House Speaker Mike Madigan quickly pinned a medal on his own shirt over the proposal, which he said would “immediately” reduce the $100 billion deficit in the pension system by $20 billion.

It turns out, the numbers-counters at Illinois Policy Institute say, that’s not exactly right.

Now, few would quibble over a little embellishment — what’s a billion dollars among friends, right? — but the group’s analysts say $6 billion to $8 billion of that promised reduction is accounting “magic.”

Gimmickry, if you will.

“The pension bill simply delays implementing the accounting change until fiscal year 2016. This means that the state gets to pretend that at least $6 billion to $8 billion of the pension debt simply doesn’t exist for now,” according to analysts.

But in 2016, the pension carriage turns back into a pumpkin and that amount will get added back onto the unfunded liability.

The pension proposal eventually uses a cost method known as “entry age normal” to determine how much to pay into pensions. That, analysts say, is good — but “switching to this new accounting method actually increases the state’s unfunded liability by approximately $6 billion to $8 billion in the short term, because it attempts to spread the costs over the course of employees’ careers, rather than having them backloaded like we do now,” according to Illinois Policy Institute.

The result might be that the average Illinoisan sees rainbows and sunshine in reach for the future of the pension program, but the people who know numbers are not as enthused.

Most of those who determine the state’s credit rating — certainly no small matter — say they will wait to see how the numbers pan out. That leaves Illinois with the worst credit in the nation at least a while longer.

Maybe lawmakers can use that time to check the numbers for themselves, and then work on developing a plan that addresses how to truly get the pension debt under control by fixing the problem instead of just hiding it for a few years.