-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Summary and audio linked here.
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.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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Oswego Willy is so insufferable….he’s so ignorant he doesn’t even know how ignorant he is.
Those comments lol…blissfully unaware of the echo chamber in which they dwell. Not sure if they come across more as teachers pets or cronies. Leaning towards the latter.
This Capitol Fax article and comments reminded me of a quote from Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (1866) that I ran across recently. The quote describes a character’s nightmare about a plague: “Those infected were seized immediately and went mad. Yet people never considered themselves so clever and unhesitatingly right as these infected ones considered themselves. Never had they considered their decrees, their scientific deductions, their moral convictions, and their beliefs more firmly based. Whole settlements, whole cities and nations, were infected and went mad… People killed each other with senseless rage…” Seems a pretty accurate description of what we see… Read more »
Miller’s analysis is predictable. But it is more interesting to read the comments to his post. Most of them parrot the first comment that Wirepoints doesn’t understand how the legislature operates. That’s the point– THAT IS HOW THE ILLINOIS LEGISLASTURE OPERATES! On the Dem side they have for so many decades clung like mushrooms in the dark waiting for Madigan to tell them all which levers to pull. The Repubs have been so inept for twenty years they don’t have a clue how to have input or stop executive branch actions. A properly functioning legislature would engage in many issues,… Read more »
Exactly right. Miller and his commenters (which he selectively rigs) have so badly lost self-awareness that they provide a lens into the minds of the political establishment that destroyed the state.
Rich Miller is a fat slob who writes what the unions tell him to. He has zero creditability.