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.
Here we go. Pushing the ramp out 10 years hides the true cost of the pensions, inflates today’s salaries even further, and defers pension costs to people furthest away from those that consumed the services rendered at the time. Never allow pension systems to re-amortize unless a corresponding wage freeze is enacted as well.