Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
The article failed to mention that counties under PTELL jurisdiction any abatement or even homeowners deductions given increase the tax rate for everyone else so the taxing bodies never receive what was levied (not collected or billed the year before).