The investigation has reached blockbuster status: The FBI has surreptitiously recorded the speaker of the Illinois House as well as Chicago’s two most influential aldermen — City Council committee chairmen who’ve overseen zoning and finances.

At unknown intervals over almost five years, one of those aldermen, Danny Solis, has functioned as a government agent under FBI direction and control. He enabled the feds to hear who-knows-how-many conversations with who-knows-which politicians and other supplicants eager to win his favor.

“I didn’t create the law, but I’m certainly very grateful to participate in it,” Burke says of his legislative pension. “I paid the dues, not only the travel” to and from Springfield “but being disassociated from my society” in Chicago.

“This is not the easiest job,” he says. “I didn’t sit in an ivory tower . . . We were, like, the grunts.”

Some cities may not want to assume the super-high prices, congestion, “woke” politics, and massive inequality that attend the arrival of thousands of temporary, temperamental, young creative types working on the more glamorous—but also more fleeting—side of the innovation economy.

The full study is linked here.

An actuary’s perspective.

Comment: It will take some time to measure the results of the buyout plan, but don’t expect it to save the state much.

Their reaction to the monthly Crain’s article by Wirepoints’ Mark Glennon.